Searching in shops across 🇪🇺
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@remi said in How large is your, erm, M.2?:
@Carnage I don't really like Amazon for specialist stuff like this. But they do have 2 advantages: first, they pop up immediately on search result (the
is an easy prey for SEO...) and they have a huge catalogue that makes it easy to get a quick glimpse of the type of things that do exist.And second, and more annoyingly in this case, you need to know what the good shops for specialist stuff are, and particularly I need to find a French website since I'm going to order physical stuff! An EU site would work as well (German etc.) but it needs to be EU (and not only written in moon language!) otherwise I'll be shafted in delivery + VAT + import taxes and it may take ages. And for computer stuff... I just don't know where to go!
Like @Carnage, I never started to use Amazon. And since the largest Czech electronic shop, which I used to use for long, expanded to other stuff and succumbed to enshittification too, I switched to using zbozi.cz, which is a local search engine that searches across hundreds of local e-shops.
The point of specialized search is that it has, and can use, the structured information like the shops themselves. So if I looked for a disk, it'd route me to a SSD category and present me the filters for capacity, interface, etc. and brand. And under each type (it can't always match all the offers, but most it does) the list of shops that have it with prices and ratings of those shops. Works really great.
But Czechia is a small pond. So I'd like to be able to do something similar across 🇪🇺. Unfortunately last time I tried, I couldn't persuade Google to restrict the search to EU shops, and since then they even removed the shops button—if I'm searching for goods, I want to tell the search engine in advance that I want shops.
So, has anybody heard of a specialized search for shops in EU, or a global one that can be filtered to EU?
(or does it only work because Czechia is such a small pond and has therefore lower enshittification pressure?)
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@Bulb My method for PC things is usually: first try to find the model I need through a tech website that also has price info on all Dutch/B*****n shops (https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/) And then an additional search on the webs for the exact model&type. Usually I end up with the Dutch shop anyway, due to shipping costs. Not aware of any general non-shit EU-spanning (curated) site.
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@robo2 The big problem is persuading everyone to participate in the metadata system fairly. The bigger the market, the more likely it is that some cheapskate asshole will slap all the tags ever on their shit just to try to hustle up a sale, despite that's really just pissing in the well and making everyone poorer.
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@Bulb I'd love for such a shop to exist, but I don't know of any. I think the EU is still too fragmented and still has pretty much national markets side-by-side, at least for the consumer (also, a significant share of people will stumble on any site that's not written in their language -- they may read English, but not necessarily at a level good-enough to be confident to spend money). Also like @dkf said, "specialisation" only works with a good curation and sadly that's far too easy to shit on.
In France and for computer stuff, I remembered yesterday that https://materiel.net (literally "hardware.net") has (had?) a reasonably good reputation, and that's where I found the links posted in the other thread. I know of a couple of others but they're... at best average, if not poor.
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If it will ever exist, I suspect it will be pricerunner. I remember integrating with them for customs data and stuff, but their web ui doesn't have filtering by economic region from what I could see from a quick gander.
