That's probably more or less what's happening. If the site is doing full-text search, and there are no exact matches, adding more terms is going to generate more and more partial matches. Some kind of re-ranker might be able to make sense of them but those are difficult to get good results out of, probably rarely employed by a run-of-the-mill commerce site, and might be drowned out by competing objectives (sponsored results, ranking by likelihood of purchase, etc.)

This is so ridiculous and so true.

it's even worse because the searches and even sidebar checkboxes don't let you filter OUT things.

   "dishwasher -smart"
   "lawnmower without wifi"

It reminds me of the article about supermarkets who periodically rearrange the entire store to bump sales (to the distress of customers)

> As the old saying goes if you aren’t paying for the service then you aren’t the customer.

And that saying hasn't been accurate in ages, because some of the best things are free (Debian) and paying doesn't get you good service. In particular, when I am trying to spend money and the stupid site refuses to help me.

Except I am seeing the same thing on shopping sites where I am the paying customer. I was shopping for some RAM the other day. I searched for 'DDR5 6000 cl30 64gb'. I hoped to see all the 64gb kits that met those specs. Instead I had to wade through many results that were only 32gb, had a higher cl rate, or different speeds.

Unfortunately, Kagi has a similar problem.

Before, I felt it would search exactly the terms I wrote.

Now, it freely ignores some of the terms, and I find myself prefixing most of my queries' words with plus sign (+) so it enforces the search.

_Personally_, I feel the quality of Kagi's search has decreased, lately.

However, I still prefer it to other search engines.