posted
Anybody tried to find anything on Amazon.com lately? They've changed their site so that when you enter a search term, instead of just searching titles and authors, it searches "the complete inside text of 120,000 books--all 33 million pages of them". Their introduction page goes on to say that "since we've integrated Search Inside the Book into our standard search, using it is as easy as entering a search term in our regular search box."
Now, if they allowed you to specify whether you wanted to search for, say, Author, Title, or content, that would be a useful feature. As it is, though, you don't have that option, unless I'm missing something.
For example, this morning I wanted to find a book called Monkey. In the past, I would have just entered the word "Monkey" into the search field, and then sorted through the hundred or so texts that would have popped up as a result of my search. The same search, today, returned 27,496 results. I could sort them alphabetically and go straight to the "M"s, but there is no option to skip straight to a particular letter, so I'd have to surf through thousands of pages before I got to the letter I was after.
Please, tell me that I'm just missing something obvious, and that the site is still easily searchable.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
::officially feels embarassed for not having made his way to the "Advanced Search" page on his own::
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
It's still a pain. They should have the keyword search on the advanced search page and the old one back as the quick search. That's the purpose of a quick search, isn't it? To make things easier on people who know what they're looking for?
Posts: 4292 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
I definitely agree with that. I've written them a letter complaining. Actually, though, I did it before you walked me through getting to the advanced search page, so I expect their reply will be something to the effect of "Hey, moron, try going to the Advanced Search page".
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
It's just gonna get worse. Google is going public. And stock sales means outside stock holders. Which means a legal requirement of 'anything to make a buck'. Which means sorting through tons of advertiser spam to find a useful article.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
That happens to every search engine eventually. Then, if it proves too inconvienient, surfers will just look for a new favorite, and someone will emerge to fill that niche.
Or Google will get it right and characterize their present tactics as good business, a better mousetrap.
posted
Yes, sadly the age of the Internet as a free source of useful information may have be passed us as more and more websites either have "dummed" down their services or significantly increased advertising, such as by using advertisements that fill the entire web browser for a few seconds before you can view the web page.
In the case of Amazon, I still fail to see why their new search is even useful. After all, do any library's have search engines that actually can search inside of the book. No. The reason is because it is highly inefficient and rarely do people search regarding the content of an individual book, and if they do it is usually by the book's genre such as Historical Fiction on California. Lets just hope that they improve the efficiency of their new search engine soon, such as by adding a drop-down menu that lets you choose whether your search item is a title, author, etc.
Posts: 5 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
I never use amazon because I have found that buy.com ALWAYS has better prices on books, while still having a very large selection.
Posts: 331 | Registered: Oct 2003
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