> erring on the side of including irrelevant items
This is the reason for this problem. When searching for 'cat' and sorting by lowest price, the first promoted item doesn't contain the word cat and neither does the first actual result (but they are cat items).
If they didn't hoist 'legitimately hard' problems onto themselves, maybe they wouldn't need to solve them.
I would guess that adding fuzzy match to the candidate selection layer would result in better results after ranking with the default “Featured” ranker. Search teams tend to be pretty data-driven and likely have the ability to test whether a change like this improves revenue or some result satisfaction metric.
You can’t buy cats on Amazon, this is a poor example. But if you need the kittie fresh liter-o-magic model 2, then you will get the specific listings or nothing at all (garbage results as op said)
This is the reason for this problem. When searching for 'cat' and sorting by lowest price, the first promoted item doesn't contain the word cat and neither does the first actual result (but they are cat items).
If they didn't hoist 'legitimately hard' problems onto themselves, maybe they wouldn't need to solve them.