It's actually even slightly worse than this article suggests.
The sales funnel for ordering tickets from the official website looks roughly like this:
1. Search for tickets. Selecting "only available" actually means "show only those that we don't know are unavailable".
2. Click on an event. Find out that
a) the tickets are actually not available at all ("tickets unavailable" or
b) only the most expensive tickets are still available (£200+)
c) there are still tickets you can afford
3. Add tickets to your shopping list
4. Proceed to check out and payment
The most infuriating part is that at any of these steps you may find out that the tickets were actually not available after all, even step 4.
What's worse, the shopping list really is a shopping basket, not a wishlist. You cannot just add tickets to all the events you would potentially like to go to and then only pay for one pair of those that are available. If you do that, and in step 4, it turns out that of the 20 tickets you selected, 8 are available, you can only proceed by paying for all 8 tickets or cancel altogether (and probably lose the chance to buy tickets, as they are released into the pool again).
This means that in practice, you keep going through all the steps, adding tickets to your shopping list, proceed to check out, find out they are unavailable, go back to shopping list, remove unavailable tickets, rinse and repeat. It's terrible.
I finally did end up buying tickets, by the way, and I do want to point out some factual errors in the article:
1. There are email alerts for newly released tickets. They are in the newsletter that you can opt-in for when you create an account on the ticketing website.
2. While there is no clearly marked option "search all available tickets for all sports on all dates in all venues", there are other ways to search than just by sport. You have to specify one of sport, venue or date, which leaves:
a) searching by venue or group of venues. Most of the sports are in the "Olympic park venues" or the "London venues", so searching by venue group is a LOT more convenient (see http://cl.ly/image/213p2f0r022p).
b) searching by date. You can simply select the first day of the Olympics and the last day and it will search all sports on all dates in all venues.
Both things are far from obvious and the usability problems pointed out are real, but for the dedicated it's still possible to get tickets.
You're completely correct, search results are cached.
This was easily verifiable when they released tickets while I was searching for tickets a few days ago. If I searched "Olympic Park venues" & "All days" I got very different results compared to search "Olympic Park venues" & "28th July -> 12th August". Clearly those two searches should always return the same result set.
The sales funnel for ordering tickets from the official website looks roughly like this:
The most infuriating part is that at any of these steps you may find out that the tickets were actually not available after all, even step 4.What's worse, the shopping list really is a shopping basket, not a wishlist. You cannot just add tickets to all the events you would potentially like to go to and then only pay for one pair of those that are available. If you do that, and in step 4, it turns out that of the 20 tickets you selected, 8 are available, you can only proceed by paying for all 8 tickets or cancel altogether (and probably lose the chance to buy tickets, as they are released into the pool again).
This means that in practice, you keep going through all the steps, adding tickets to your shopping list, proceed to check out, find out they are unavailable, go back to shopping list, remove unavailable tickets, rinse and repeat. It's terrible.
I finally did end up buying tickets, by the way, and I do want to point out some factual errors in the article:
Both things are far from obvious and the usability problems pointed out are real, but for the dedicated it's still possible to get tickets.