A simple way to get better Amazon search results

When you do a text search on Amazon, by default you’ll usually get suboptimal results. There’s an alternative, much better results page.

In this example, we’ll search for fire extinguishers. Here’s the default results page:

Notice the Fire Extinguishers section I’ve marked with an arrow on the left pane. You’ll often see this kind of thing — an official section that matches your search. What you want is that official section — it will give you the best results. But we’re not getting it yet. Let’s try clicking on it:

We’re almost there, but notice that Amazon is still running our search term even though we’re already on the official Fire Extinguishers section. We’re running a search for fire extinguishers in the official Fire Extinguishers section, which turns out to be suboptimal.

What we need to do is turn off that text search and just see the curated Fire Extinguishers section — this will give us much better results, as you’re about to see. There’s no X next to our search term to delete it, so what you’ll want to do is go into the search box and just delete “fire extinguishers” or whatever you have in there, and then press Enter on your keyboard. This will produce the curated Fire Extinguishers section:

Notice that we now have curated results, organized on useful criteria like Best sellers, Top rated (my favorite), and beyond what you see above, it will have Most wished for, Most gifted, Hot new releases, and Under $25.

I think these curated results — basically a well-organized storefront for each product category — are much better than the scattered results you get from a text search. It really helps to have the top rated products listed for you, as well as top sellers, lower priced, etc.

You’ll see the same phenomenon for lots of products and searches — toothbrushes, computer repair kits, men’s shaving lotion, women’s shaving lotion, etc. In all those cases, there will be an official section with curated results that you can get to following the steps above. Now, you can sometimes navigate to the section you want using the Amazon dropdown menu, if it’s something broad like Computers. But most of the time you probably won’t be able to navigate straight to the product categories you want. So do it this way and you’re golden.

José Duarte is a social scientist and technologist. You can reach him at gravity@protonmail.com.