It does semantic matching. We don't have a lot of exact matches for that search for birch wood (given the exact dimensions) so the engine broadens the search criteria automatically. You never want to just show exact matches, so long as they are ranked near the top over fuzzier matches. People often assume the search is bad if they see a lot of broader matches, without realizing that there might not be many perfect matches for the exact query given.
Returning things that are fundamentally incompatible with the search (like different dimensions than being searched) is actually worse than useless, as it clutters up everything and makes me spend more mental time and effort seeing if you have something in stock.
Which sucks.
HD search has been basically useless to me in the past for this exact reason. If I’m searching for a 3/8 lag bolt, returning results for 1/4 and 1/2 lag bolts mixed in with random 3/8 lag bolts are literally worse than just showing me 1 lag bolt result.
There's no indication it's doing this on purpose. It just looks broken and confusing. There also doesn't appear to be a way to tell it to only show exact matches. The obvious place would be the refinement sidebar, but dimensions are absent.
edit: for comparison, have a look at B&H's search where you can get so specific that it only shows one result
I am not sure how well this holds up when searching a product catalog. I would believe it for a general purpose search engine, but for a product catalog, I am searching for a very specific thing.
Qualifying keywords on a product catalog are likely more common. Compare the searches for "'2' x '4' birch plywood" vs "birch plywood" and you can see why exact matching can be prefered, as it's very easy for the user to generalize their search.
Matching the semantics of "it's wood and it's for building and it has a 2 in it" isn't very useful when you have something that's absolutely not semantic, like a specific size definition that's an industry standard, and not really interchangeable.
It's like searching for a 3/4" socket and getting a list of 1/4", because there's a four in each. It's not helpful. It's completely useless and makes the search results look incompetent. Put those in "related searches", with a divider or different background color, or something to separate the "right" from "obviously wrong".
The search experience for wood and sockets should be driven by usefulness, not broad SEO advertising rules of thumb where things are fuzzy.
I agree that it looks confusing, when you combine those two.
What you can do is to show the best matches on top, and add other results, which are not an exact match, but visually separate them ("You might also like these..").
That is how we usually do it. You can use this approach also when recommending visually similar products to the one you searched for.
There's definitely better ways of doing this. Like the idea is good, but it is very confusing when it happens automatically. A simple UX fix might be to show the relevant results, and then have a spacer with message like "we didn't find a lot of good matches, but maybe these will be useful".
The advantage of a computer and flexible web page designs are to make search results easy to view and understand. In the 2'x4' piece of birch plywood example above, I saw a mix of results and only items 2 & 3 on the first row and item 2 on the second row matched what I expected. I stopped looking at the results after the second row.
"People often assume the search is bad if they see a lot of broader matches". Yes, because it usually is. Non-matching results should always be indicated separately and secondarily from perfect matches.
"...without realizing that there might not be many perfect matches...". Um, I can decide if zero or more perfect matches are good enough for me. If I am looking for a specific item, related results are almost never wanted and are a waste of time. On the other hand, if I don't have something exact in mind, then browsing is OK (since I'm choosing to go broad -> narrow).
If you are old enough, remember searching for a particular word in a printed dictionary? If I didn't find the word I wanted (ie an exact search), then I knew that my spelling (ie my exact search term) was wrong. At that point I could be be finished or I could choose to do more searching. With a printed dictionary I could laboriously expand the search using alternate spellings or synonyms (ie a fuzzy search). The exact match is required for crossword puzzles. The fuzzy search is good when writing poetry and articles.
A while ago I was researching and pricing generators. I had a set of specific parameters in mind and my friend's generator that I was using at the time to compare against. Home Depot's website was partially helpful. It gave me a good overview of what Home Depot has to offer. But, there were far too many extra results and I couldn't tell if my specific item would be included without wasting a lot of time scrolling around. After a little bit of scrolling I moved on to other sites. I didn't buy a generator from Home Depot. During my searches at other sites I stopped as soon as I got an exact match.
In my generator search, the broad results were OK to get a general idea of generator price ranges for the type I wanted. It was too time consuming when I had an exact generator I wanted to compare against and couldn't limit the search. Now that I am writing this, I can honestly say I have never used Home Depot's website again.
I read the article. If I could specify some kind of specificity or weighting to control the amount of vectorization (is that the right way to say this?), I'd think this was good news. This article just confirmed I won't bother to try. Reading the article just makes the Home Depot's website sound like another Amazon search site.
