A Simple Use for AI: Product Searches Uncluttered by Promo

Have you noticed that product searches on Google or Amazon (and probably other search engines) are not what they used to be?

In the old days, ten to twenty years ago, they could be as precise as you could make them. If you wanted a “six-inch aluminum (not iron) adjustable crescent wrench with a lock tab and a rubber grip handle,” you could translate that into Boolean logic, hit the “return” key, and get a list of candidate wrenches actually offered commercially. And they would appear roughly in the order in which they met your search criteria.

That was then; this is now. If you put such a search into Amazon’s or Google’s search field today, you get multiple pages of “sponsored” products, with stuff roughly matching your search criteria either mixed in at random, or at the end. The human, old-fashioned, equivalent would be you going into a hardware store, asking a clerk your detailed question, and having him/her point vaguely in the direction of the tools section and say “Go look!” Not much advantage for the user in all that computing power, but the search-engine shareholders get a cut of most every sale!

So how can you fix this in your personal life, without banging so hard on your computer’s keyboard that you wreck it?

In my old age (now 80), my major health problem is non-life-threatening (so far!) gastric issues. They started getting worse, and I recently discovered that the magnesium supplement I take contains “silica” (i.e., sand) as one of only three ingredients. And I pull apart the capsules and put the interior powder on my morning cereal to avoid the relatively hard “vegan capsule”!

So I thought it might be a good idea to get the sand out of my diet. I searched on Amazon and Google and even Wal Mart (one of whose supercenters is the grocery store nearest my home). I got the usual mishmash of products unresponsive to my search, in relatively random order, all with confusingly similar names and promotional claims to contain this but not that. To satisfy my search, I would have had to click on some twenty or more products and examine their ingredients in detail myself. Isn’t that what computers are supposed to do?

Enter AI. I had recently started using the free trial version of Anthropic’s “Claude” AI, at first just to test it, then more and more for real information. I wrote a prompt describing my gastric issues in medical detail, my need for magnesium supplements, and my desire to skip the sand. (I chose Claude because an old WaPo review had rated it the best of five AI’s studied for scientific and medical info.)

Claude responded by validating my concern, noting that sand was used to facilitate manufacturing but could irritate my digestive system, and recommending two specific products from two specific chain drugstores. I went on the website for one of them, which I periodically patronize in person but rarely online, and I got the same disorganized, promo-ridden mess.

So I typed in the precise name of the product that Claude had recommended, “Natural Vitality CALM Magnesium Powder,” and was referred to a previously unknown (to me) health-product retailer called “Vitacost.” There I found the unflavored version of that product. (I’m a died-in-the-wool “FREE AND CLEAR” guy, who believe that unwanted scents made remanent with nanoparticles are poisoning us.) I gulped at the shipping cost of $8.99 but took the plunge. Isn’t my time worth something, even in deep retirement?

So Claude and Vitacost had saved me between a half and a full hour of frustration going through searches polluted by over-the-top marketing and promotion. In so doing, they had saved my separate Amazon Basics keyboard from likely destruction by my pounding inaccurately aimed at my desk.

I know, I know. The big push for AI—which may be the last gasp of American technological capitalism as China supersedes us—will require so much new electric power that it could contribute to ongoing positive feedback in planetary heating and so help our species self-extinguish.

But, hey, I got what I needed with most of the speed and ease that simple search engines provided maybe ten years ago, before Silicon Valley morphed into an over-the-top promotion and marketing machine. Ain’t progress grand???

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