ResearchBuzz

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service has started on a humanitarian mission: to help find Steve Fossett. As you might have heard on the news, Steve Fossett went missing on September 3 while flying over the Nevada desert. Satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts (he did not file a flight plan) and Mechanical Turk HITs have been set up to review those images.

The HIT is listed at http://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchbar?requesterId=A1U5V688O4PR3V . It’s live for a week and you have sixty minutes to work on each HIT. The HITs are small squares of satellite images that you have to review for unusual objects. Examples are provided for you; if you want to get a closer view of the image, you’re given a coordinate to use in Google Earth. With each hit, you either report that you have seen nothing unusual or you report any strange objects — a space is provided for comments.

I found some of the squares pretty dark — being able to refer to Google Earth will be a help, I’m sure. If you’ve been interested in Mechanical Turk, this is your opportunity to see how it works and help out in the search besides. You will need an Amazon account to work on the HITs.

After I whined about Amazon’s search results, I got a couple of e-mails saying, “just create your own interface to the advanced search form, dummy.”

Which is a good point, but a form is not pervasive. I don’t want to have to constantly go back to some form just to do a simple search. But that did remind me that I could do a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet, as you might remember, is like a bookmark but has a little JavaScript in it, so you can perform additional search functions.

Amazon Title Search

Use the bookmarklet above (you can save it to your own bookmarks or personal bookmark toolbar) to search Amazon titles only. I’ve tried it in Firefox and Opera, but not IE. It works particularly well with somewhat generic titles — History of Russia will get you over 20,000 results on a regular Amazon search but only 1500 or so using this bookmarklet.

I left work early today because I’m not feeling well. What I would really like to be doing right now is sleeping. Unfortunately I don’t feel well enough to sleep, which is really incompetent of me. I also don’t feel well enough to write. But I do feel well enough to start working on that Amazon problem I was complaining about the other day.

While I was poking around doing some test searches, I learned a few things I thought you might find amusing.

1) If you go to the books part of Amazon, leave the query part blank, and click Go, you’ll get 9,808,825 results at this writing in bestselling order. (Harry Potter is #1. Shocking. The result number seems to change as well — I tried it a bit later and got 9,807,691.) If you sort the results by high-to-low price, you’ll learn that you can get the digital document “Latin America Quarterly Volume Server Tracker Q2 2003″ for the low low price of $99,000. The highest item whose price is based somewhat in reality (not MY reality, a different reality — a reality where people blow their noses on $100 bills and accuse Bill Gates of being on welfare) is the Super Bowl XL Opus MVP Edition, which can be yours for only $40,000. Hurry — only 3 left! More on the way!

2) Amazon’s advanced search page allows you to search for items published before, after, or during a certain year. Setting the Amazon search page to find all books published after 2525 actually nets over 1,000 results. So we all have something to look forward to (assuming man is still alive, woman survived, etc.) Most of these pages look like they were created by sellers who were a little careless about what they put in the publication date field…

3) If you go to Amazon’s book section and search for The in the simple query field, you will get one result — for The Secret.

I ought to be able to make something out of this…