Baffling design: The Staples search engine

I did a search for “network cable” (note the singular) on the following sites and here’s what came up:

  • Best Buy Canada: network cables
  • London Drugs: network cables
  • Memory Express: network cables
  • Canada Computes: network cables
  • Amazon Canada: network cables
  • Staples Canada: tables

One of these things is not like the other. I tried doing the search in a second browser that had never been to the staples.ca site before to see what would happen and the same thing comes up–tables. Table is highlighted as the search term in each result:

Here is the URL showing the search terms:

Now, if I do a search for “network cables” (plural) the site will pull up…network cables. But when you look at the results you’ll see the items listed are in the singular:

This is inconsistent and illogical.

Is it too much to expect a search of “network cable” to not show a bunch of tables? We are 30 days away from the year 2020. I do not think this is an unreasonable thing to expect. I’m just glad I wasn’t searching for a hard disk.

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