[adambatkin]

Exactly. In fact almost everything in the article is icing on-top. The entire experience of the McMaster Carr website is the taxonomy and the fact that the search and navigation _within that taxonomy_ are all built to work seamlessly and get you to exactly what you are looking for.

Search for "bolt" - you won't get 10,000 different bolts with a pretty little filter to whittle down, you'll end up on a page with broader categories of things that may or may not have "bolt" in the name, but are all things that are in some form bolts. From there you keep drilling down, selecting different attributes until you get to an individual product (or a grid of variations, like different lengths).

Honestly, it feels like the original authors have never actually used the site, they just browsed around, thought it was laid out nicely, etc