It's Not Your Imagination. Shopping on Amazon Has Gotten Worse

'When you search for a product on Amazon, you may not realize that most of what you see at first is advertising,' reports the Washington Post's technology columnist, introducing some eye-opening interactive graphics. (Alternate URL here.)

The Post's graphics show that Amazon's first six search results — basically everything on their first screen — were all ads.

Scrolling to the second screen, we finally start to see non-ads. These are the first products that were actually chosen because they've got the best combination of price and quality. But the real results don't last long.

Scroll to the next screen, and it's all ads again. Here's a set of listings labeled 'Highly rated,' but don't be fooled.... These are also just ads. [Later the article points out that while customers can't specifically buy their way into the highly-rated section, it's still just 'often stacked with sponsored listings that don't have terrible customer reviews.' And then on the next screen three of the six displayed results are 'top rated for our brands' — that is, Amazon's own products. And then...]

Keep on scrolling, and the ads keep coming — even if they're repeats. On these first five screens, more than 50 percent of the space was dedicated to ads and Amazon touting its own products....

The first page of Amazon results includes an average of about nine sponsored listings, according to a study of 70 search terms conducted in 2020 and 2021 by data firm Profitero. That was twice as many ads as Walmart displayed, and four times as many as Target... The Amazon we experience today is pretty much the opposite of how Amazon used to work. Even as recently as 2015, Amazon's results pages were filled with actual results, ranked by relevancy to your search....

Here's a modest proposal: No more than half of any screen we see at any given time — be it on desktop web or a smartphone — should contain ads.... Another idea: Shill results should be much more clearly marked. A label disclosing that a shill listing is 'Sponsored' should have the same font, size and contrast as the most prominent text in the ad. Even better: It should have to go on the top-left part of the ad, where our eyes go first. No more burying it in the far-right corner.

The article notes that even typing the name of a specific brand may first bring up off-brand rivals who've paid for higher placement. (An Amazon spokesman tells the Post, 'This practice is good for customers — it drives discovery and presents them with more choices.')

But Post argues Amazon's various sponsored results 'fill up spaces people have every reason to expect to contain trustworthy, independent information,' ultimately warning that Amazon 'is betraying your trust in its results to make an extra buck.... Sure, Google and Facebook are chock full of ads, too. But on Amazon, we're supposed to be the customers, not the eyeballs for sale.'
Ironically, since 2013 the Washington Post has been owned by... Jeff Bezos.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.