> Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate.
Amazon's system for finding related products fucking sucks. After I buy an X, I see ads for more X for months, which is completely useless. Sometimes I'll see ads for the exact thing I bought... what?!
Yep, I see this all the time too. Buy a printer? Amazon thinks you want to buy a new printer every day for months.
Google too. I bought a Pixel 2 online, from Google, signed in to Google. Now I see ads on Google ad networks all day long to buy a Pixel 2. It has been 5 months of daily ads from Google to buy the phone I just bought. Ridiculous.
Ad networks are a clear financial win for AI - but they also show the ridiculousness and are clear windows into the failures so far.
This. For all the talk about how Facebook is mining data to hyper-target customers, it still seems like they're still trying to throw stuff at the wall to see if it sticks.
That is amazing too me. When I did inside sales for a VAR in college in the 90s, we wrote a little app that would note the customer's account notes a few months after a printer installation to ask about toner.
It had a high conversion rate and better still got us referrals to the head executive assistant (who was usually the boss's assistant).
I find that particular, oft-repeated bug fascinating. It's a known issue, but one that seems to spread across many vendors and ad networks. I have to assume there's something very stubborn about the system design that makes it harder to fix than it feels like it should be.
(One hypothesis: Perhaps for privacy reasons or Amazon-not-wanting-to-give-away-the-whole-farm-on-sale-conversion reasons, ad networks only have visibility onto what you've seen, not whether you actually closed the purchase).
What I normally do is searching on Google on monday morning a "cool" thing, like "drone" or "camera" and then I enjoy all the week these "targeted" ads, thus avoiding quite a few about "random" things I am not interested in like toasters, diapers, and similar.
Not that I am actually interested in drones or cameras.
Amazon's system for finding related products fucking sucks. After I buy an X, I see ads for more X for months, which is completely useless. Sometimes I'll see ads for the exact thing I bought... what?!