I've been spoiled by LLMs in my daily work and now want to put the same kind of prompts into search boxes. Not "air fryers" but "air fryers without bluetooth or wifi and less than 3 cooking modes, and no negative reviews about the device failing prematurely." I'm not going to let Alexa plus or minus listen into my whole life, but I would like some that of intelligence when I actually go shopping.
I've found Perplexity.ai with Deepseek R1 to be very good at choosing a product or a hotel for me. I just punched in your query and it actually chose the air fryer that's already sitting in my kitchen ! "Cosori Pro LE Air Fryer"
Another example, after spending an hour on trip advisor going back and forth to maps to check for walking route to my destination, please recommend a hotel, more of a guesthouse, in marrakesh, near le jardin secret in the medina. something with a local flavor, not 5 star european -- I was so relieved to be able to book direct and be done with it.
> How do you know it's not selected because it's the one with the most paid ads? Or reddit fake reviews? Or llm generated seo articles about it?
These questions apply to any review or recommendation, from anyone, not just LLMs. How did anyone find out about the product at all? Did they do rigorous testing before they made a recommendation? Is there shared understanding between the recommender and recommendee about desired level of quality or what the user intents that need to be satisfied are? Are they even speaking the same language? Is their concept of "red" the same as ours?
At some point, you have to make a decision and buy with imperfect information, and treat it as an experiment. If it's not right for you, then return it for a full refund from Amazon. This is unfortunate. It costs money, time, and adds lots of friction to the whole process.
Maybe advertisers or manufacturers should post quality assurance bonds for their products, in addition to money-back guarantees or easy returns. Upon receiving a lemon or dumb product, you would return the item and activate the arbitration/bond clause and possibly get money out of the posted quality assurance bond.
> These questions apply to any review or recommendation
Sure but even on HN people seem to treat them as some kind of omniscient Gods or oracle of truth. It's like we all lowered our defences and stopped being critical because the new circus monkey does cool tricks.
At the end of the day they're blackboxes built on stolen data by for profit private organizations, all the red flags are here
Fair enough. I did similar searches for best air fryer and selected one based on reading a few dozen reviews on Amazon. It's just a coincidence that Perplexity landed on the same one, but I'm happy to back up it's hallucinatory opinion with a real human two thumbs up.
Google was a great product for searching the best deal too. As was Amazon back in the day.
Perplexity.ai is massively in the red, and would have to extract a profit somewhere.
Even if perplexity.ai is really great at searching for products, it's great at searching for products for now. For now SEO didn't found a way to play a game, and for now no ad deals have been (to my knowledge) made.
And that's generally true for all commercial LLMs. They are unprofitable as is.
So even if they give you amazing advice, at one point the advise could get worse and it will be hard to notice.
I am on a one-month free trial of Perplexity Pro and its deep research is excellent. It may very occasionally deviate from the original query, but I will still miss it a lot. It makes using Google feel like such a chore.
I've noticed that instacart (and by extension, Costco same day shopping) has integrated an LLM into their search. It's awesome to be able to search for "ingredients for a chicken and vegetable roast" and have all the separate ingredients you need be returned. You can also search for things like "healthy snack" or "easy party appetizers".
I think this is a great use case for LLM search since I am able to directly input my intent, and the LLM knows what's in stock at the store I am searching.
Nothing you describe hasn't already been done in the pre-LLM era with simple keyword matching.
In the city i lived in 2012, the (now defunct) local supermarket chain could handle your roasted chicken request. You could also paste an entire grocery list into a text box and have it load the items into your cart all at once. That's the feature i moss the most.
I just tried your snack and appetizers requests with the grocery service i currently use, and it worked fine. No "AI" needed.
All while disclaiming all responsibility for all the low quality / dangerous / poisonous crap they facilitate sale of. Talk about having your cake and eating it too
Amazon puts sponsored product listings in the search results. The more you search without finding the product you want, the more ad impressions are generated.
Amazon needs to actually sell you things to make money. They have an entire supply chain built around it. Ads that never convert aren’t gonna pay for that.
I stopped shopping at Amazon about a year ago. Too much overhead figuring out the good products, vs the scam products, vs the mediocre but pushed products.
Been using Newegg/BestBuy for electronics, Costco/Target/Walmart for home goods, local grocery stores for food, and Barnes and Noble for books. I used to be good at picking out the gems from the cruft on Amazon, but either it's gotten more difficult or I've lost my edge.
Also kinda nice having to wait again until I have a sizeable order to get free shipping. Much less junk.
Now that they tend to price match Amazon and vice-versa there really is no reason to buy from Amazon. If it's in my local stores BB gets it to me faster too.
I'm so horrifically disappointed every time I go in there. Their monitor selection is all super low-end trash, as is most of their electronics they sell (TVs, stereos, computers etc). You're lucky if they have an actual PC component in the store, there are bare shelves everywhere. They don't even offer a good selection of phones, accessories or memory cards. It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out of business. Overall, it feels like a store for people who need to buy an electronic item without knowing why or what they're gonna do with it.
> It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out of business.
It'd take a lot for it to get that bad. Towards the end, Fry's was filling entire aisles with random cheap junk unrelated to electronics like hand sanitizer, light bulbs, pepper spray, etc - and even with that, they were still having to wall off large sections of the store that they couldn't fill.
Best Buy's web site still carries some quality. It also has some random items you might not expect. I found a sling bag on their site in a size that had been sold out on the brand's site for months. These days BB and BHPhoto tend to be where I start my searches for electronic items when I know what I want.
If you order from Walmart and limit it to what is in their actual store then you know at least some human vetted it as safe for sale in the US. Walmart also lets 3rd party sellers on their website and yes most of that is drop shipped junk just like amazon.
That's exactly what I asked for, wow. To whoever asked why should Amazon want to do this, it's to keep their customers from bypassing their own search with services like this one.
Curious as to what LLMs you are using to allow successful queries like this and what are you using them for? If you don't mind sharing. My understanding was that these would result in some fairly random, maybe true maybe not, results. Is there a company with a RAG that produces reliable results? If so, I would like to check it out.
The majority is coding in an IDE with Claude. It outputs results that I can validate immediately. There are lots of wrong answers to be tossed out but it's still a large acceleration over just docs and stackoverflow.
I can understand the skepticism if you use it in a context where you can't independently test the answers, so you can't filter out the trash. But it's a big level up when you can.
