Screw Amazon’s new “Search Inside the Book!”

By now most Amazon.com users have learned about Amazon.com’s new ability to do an every-word search of titles they offer.  I never saw anything so useless in my life.  Its main problem is that it gives back too much information, and the bits you want to find are generally buried down in the middle, so you still spend most of your time wading through masses of irrelevant guff.  And the searches that were once efficient are now diluted to the point of being pointless.  After hearing a grouse from my mother about how bad it was, and reading in Neil Gaiman’s journal that peasant reaction has been mixed, I went to Amazon to see “what now.”

I went searching for books by the historian and artist Jack Jackson (Jaxon) yesterday.  I gave his name to Search Inside the Book and got back 23,559 hits.  The first item that did me any good (i.e., wasn’t O/P or OSI) was number 32, and to find that much I had to wade through listings for books about diving and off-roading and radio plays.  Matters got even worse when I used his pen name.  Then I got listings for a stack of Anne McCaffrey books where the name of a character, Jaxom, had been mistyped.  Eventually I gave up on the mess, and switched to the old-fashioned author name search—at which point I got sixty hits, of which 21 were Jack’s.  Much better and lots more useful.

Then I found that Amazon’s running a contest:  “Tell us about your experience with Search Inside the Book in 100 words or less!”  First prize is a Segway, ten runners-up receive $100 Amazon gift certificates.  Oh, this is too good to resist.

This was my contest entry:

My Search Inside the Book experience was very negative.  I searched for books by Jack Jackson, a historian and artist.  Whether I used his own name or his pen name of “Jaxon,“ I was given a useless set of results; most were only passing references, if they even mentioned him at all.  (I had LOTS of false hits!)  The first book by Jaxon was hit number 50 of 70!  Only when I used the old-fashioned author name search could I find the books I wanted.  Dump this loser of a “feature” NOW!!

So take a few minutes to enter the contest.  Tell Jeff Bezos in a hundred words exactly how much his latest Bright Idea sucks donkey dicks.  We still have a chance to Stop the Stupidity.