Something I really wish vendor product pages did

September 9, 2006

Dear vendors:

When I am visiting your fine web pages, I am often most trying to find which of your products have a particular feature that I need. Making me carefully check through all of your products, examining their model numbers (if I am lucky) or each of their detailed feature pages (if I am not) is not productive and does not make me very happy.

(It does make me thankful for Firefox's tabs.)

So what I would really like to see is a product feature search page of some sort, so that I could tell you that I am looking (for example) for a PCIe graphics card with dual DVI outputs that is based on the ATI X800 or X850 chipsets, and you can give me a nice list of just the things I want, thereby encouraging me to buy from you instead of from someone else who irritates me less.

You can even get yourself some Web 2.0 buzz by calling this 'tagging'.

(I want an X800/X850 based card because that is the most recent graphics chipset (that I can get in a PCIe card) that has open source 2D support. I would like open source 3D support, but my options for that seem to be either an ATI Radeon 9200, available only in AGP, or Intel graphics, available only as integrated graphics on motherboards.)


Comments on this page:

From 70.231.132.198 at 2006-09-09 14:01:57:

newegg provides this. also a power search so you can specify multiple choices from each category if their choices don't exactly match. I in fact used this just the other day to buy the cheapest reasonable dual-dvi card I coud.

--nothings

By cks at 2006-09-10 01:29:36:

Newegg is a great example of the sort of things that the vendor sites should be doing but aren't. For some reason I skipped the power search before; it could have saved me some time.

Unfortunately I'm not sure I entirely trust Newegg's data on what cards have multiple DVI connectors; I believe I saw cases where they listed a card as single-DVI when other sources (reviews with photos and the manufacturer's website) claimed it was dual-DVI.

(I suppose the joke's on me if Newegg's data turns out to be more trustworthy than the vendor's website and potentially out of date reviews.)

Written on 09 September 2006.
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