Idiotic Product Popularity Field

Today, I thought I'd mention one of the most idiotic, 1990's-style technology "features" in Volusion, the Product Popularity field, found in the Misc screen of the Volusion back office:

You see, Volusion isn't intelligent enough to return search results based on standard criteria, such keyword density, so the brilliant decision-makers in Austin (BTW, I love the city, but hate the fact that Volusion has chosen to darken such a wonderful place with its presence) decided to ask users to assign an arbitrary value to every item. Subsequently, the default return on a product search on a Volusion e-Commerce site would be based, not on the appropriateness of each individual result as it pertains to the word(s) used to search for the product, but on a wild-assed guess by the site's manager at what he THINKS the results will be for every product.

Why is this important?

Well, if a site has ten products, it probably isn't important at all.  However, if a site has 10,000 products, then it's pretty damned important.

For example, let's assume you are a prospective customer who wants to buy an 8-inch Honeywell air circulator fan, so you entered these five words in bold into the search field of a Volusion site that you KNOW sells this fan (I chose this product only partly at random, but partly because I have five of them and they're awesome fans). The search results you get back will include any and all items that have the following words:

8-inch
Honeywell
air
circulator
fan

But, the order of those results will all depend on the arbitrary value that the person maintaining the site decided to place into this stupid Product Popularity field. So, in this case, you might get back 300 results from the search, and if the arbitrary product popularity value is lowest on the item that you want, it will be listed DFL in the search results (that's Dead F-ing Last for those of you in Bakersfield) behind such notable possible items as a Honeywell thermostat, Nike Air Shox or an 8-inch, battery-operated "toy" that is curiously not to be used on unexplained calf pain.

A real e-Commerce application would've looked at the fact that all five of these keywords matched the description of the fan (in bold above) and would've returned the fan first in the list, since it matched the most keywords from the search.

Just another reason why Volusion sucks.