@inhawaii wrote:
Can you imagine walking in to the drugstore an saying ... "I'd like to buy some pills. Anything with a dosage of two will be fine."
Okay, first of all: LOL. I genuinely Laugh Out Loud at other people's posts so infrequently that I feel the need to report it when it happens. 😁
As for where in the world those Item Specific entries come from, their sheer cluelessness makes it obvious to me that the system is scraping them from seller listings, on the somewhat misguided theory that every seller knows his product and puts in specifics that they think their potential buyers will be searching for. Thus some are logical and some just make you say, "Huh?"
Unfortunately, I have seen no way of weeding out the truly dumb ones (one or more useless values which are options in the category, or useless categories as a whole, such as your "Dosage" example). Once they get in, it seems like they're in there forever.
I sell a lot in niche vintage markets, so I have a deep knowledge of my products and how to categorize them in ways that I know my buyers will use. At the same time, though, it shows me some truly ridiculous Item Specifics that not only would not be logical search parameters for that item, but also make no sense in context.
The system seems geared up to accept any Specifics contributions without question if they occur enough times in multiple listings. It might be better to see how many different sellers' listings are using a given Specific and/or its possible values, as opposed to what seems like one seller using a nonsense Specific in every single one of his listings, regardless of whether it's relevant now or ever was in the past, but he bangs it in to so many of his listings (such as via Sell Similar) that the system comes to think that it's something useful.
It would be more helpful if Value choices for a given Specific that are not used very often were quietly dropped after some period of time. Granted, automating the process so that it "learns" which Specifics are used and which should be abandoned requires a lot more coding than has been done to date, but the shaky results that sellers have been complaining about for literally years now show that the work has got to continue, if Item Specifics are ever going to reach the point of being genuinely useful.
When there are millions of users all plugging in what they think are useful or relevant Item Specifics, the system is going to collapse under the weight of all the duplicate, confusing or junk values unless it has some way of purging itself of unused rubbish on a regular, ongoing basis.
