Comments on: Making Money From the Paradox of Choice http://blog.simeonov.com/2007/02/19/making-money-from-the-paradox-of-choice/ Simeon Simeonov on entrepreneurship, innovation & venture capital Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:31:28 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Shopping vs. Buying « HighContrast http://blog.simeonov.com/2007/02/19/making-money-from-the-paradox-of-choice/#comment-17104 Fri, 15 Feb 2008 02:46:21 +0000 http://simeons.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/making-money-from-the-paradox-of-choice/#comment-17104 [...] So I go to the thefind.com and search for jogging stroller. I get 12,189 results from 540 stores. I’m not sure about you but to me that answer is both annoying and depressing. Annoying because I bet there aren’t 12,189 types of jogging strollers out there. It shows that thefind.com has good crawling tech and pretty poor equivalence matching algorithms. Depressing because those kinds of numbers just make me feel like I’ll never be sure I picked the right one. (That has to do with the paradox of choice.) [...]

]]> By: Jerry http://blog.simeonov.com/2007/02/19/making-money-from-the-paradox-of-choice/#comment-3707 Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:32:22 +0000 http://simeons.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/making-money-from-the-paradox-of-choice/#comment-3707 I agree with you on several points. More is not always better. I’ve spent the majority of my career learning to provide less choice. This is because I was taught that people who are the drivers in an organization are too busy to be presented with a lot of choices so only show them the 2-3 best in your bag. Analytical people (i.e. engineers) are always interested in being presented with more choices. They can never get enough and are people that are best avoided!

When I do a search on the internet I would also appreciate less choice. That’s because, despite my best efforts at creating meaningful queries (boolean, etc), I’m usually presented with a handful of useful results (sometimes not even that) and a trillion useless ones. When searching for something arcane, it rarely comes up in the top results. What happens is that I end up wasting an enormous amount of my time clicking through a variety of the top 40-50 links hoping that the search engine found something meaningful. I need to discipline myself into never going beyond the first results page!!

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