One workaround is to use Duckduckgo or Google to search Amazon; that tends to take you directly to the products you're looking for.

One thing Amazon really needs is a way to search for a product with a specific size/weight/<other property> range. Search for "3 inch screw" and you'll get screws of all sizes. Another bad thing Amazon has started doing is throwing random products into the search results. Search for pillow cases and you also get a bicycle and shoes in the search results. The review weightings were changed some years ago to make the "average" higher also, it's no longer really an average, especially when the lowest review score is one instead of zero.

After the pandemic messed up it's algorithms Amazon never really recovered and search results have gotten really weird. There are many obvious examples of price gouging as well. It really seems like Amazon is now selling us to the products, rather than selling the products to us. And why on earth does Amazon still (after many years of doing this) list products that are not available? I can understand keeping the pages active for previous buyers, but a search for a product should not turn up hundreds of hits for things that are not actually available. Additionally, instead of returning only items that match my keywords, I often find that two or three pages into the search results the products listed don't match ANY of my keywords, and there will be 20 pages of them; they are adding hundreds of products at the end of search results that could not possibly be relate to what I'm looking for, just to try to sell me _something_.

I am starting to see this myself. I had to send back a lot of my toddler's Christmas toys due to "good" reviews which were obvious fake. The quality and scale of the toys received was horrible (think dollar store quality). The amount of garbage you have to wade through is becoming concerning.

Amazon reminds me of the bad old Internet Explorer/Netscape days when you had to sift through several pages as sponsored nonsense to find the few results that apply to what you were searching for. It's not that bad YET, but recently I had to scroll past a dozen sponsored items to get to my query. A good way to bypass this is to do a site search on Google...ie, "High Output Management" on Amazon. But that Google is so great these days.

To your point about sheets, I once purchased a supposedly-new white bedsheet that was not only torn, but soiled with small spots of some red/brown (blood?). I was obviously resold a used item.

I was so disgusted that I still remember this was when my perception of Amazon changed. It wasn’t the last time I would be disappointed by item quality. I still use Amazon, but mostly for consumables these days.

I look at the distribution of reviews. I also read the one and two star reviews. That is where I find the real dirt on a product.

Saw a show the other day about how some vendors could merge their bad reviews with a completely different product and thereby improve how theirs appears. You can notice it when the description people use does not match the product.

This merging of reviews is such a stupid thing to allow, I couldn't understand why would Amazon want this.

Really? We did almost all our Christmas shopping on Amazon and had no complaints. Other businesses delivered late.

Last night I ordered soft drinks from Amazon Fresh and they were delivered in less than 12 hours.

I do agree with sloaken. Read the 1- and 2-star reviews, and make sure the 5-star reviews aren't talking about a different product.

Sellers are also treated as subhuman.

Their packaging is also careless! They have ruined so many books I ordered, and I am now buying most from other online stores instead (even though they are often more expensive).

It’s a great way to get free books.

I reported this (0552167673) about 3 months ago, for having the wrong image, nothing has happened yet...