ResearchBuzz

I’m not going to give you a context because you’ll have more fun thinking up your own. So I’ll just say that last week at work I had occasion to type the following query into Amazon:

Anthology of American Literature Douchebag

(Yes, I know it’s not a clever word. I plead melted brain.)

I got one result.

I must admit I did run that query in response to a joke that one of my co-workers made. They were very surprised when I started poking the monitor with my finger, screeching, “Dammit, that’s why I hate this search engine! Because I get these kind of results! I should not get a result for Anthology of American Literature Douchebag!”

Now, the obvious question is “How did Amazon come up with that result?” Amazon got that result because the book in the search result (The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature: The Collected Writings of Neal Pollack, if you care) has, on page 48, the word “Douchebags”. Not quite enough of a connection, in my opinion, to warrant an actual returned result. Because this happens a lot when I try to search Amazon. I get a lot of results that seem entirely superfluous to what I’m actually looking for, and it gets tough to shop.

Now, Amazon’s advanced search page for books is actually very nice. The only thing I’d ask for is the ability to search by published date range instead of before, after, or during. But the advanced search page is not easy to access — one ends up sticking with the simple query box.

Here’s what I’d really like to see. I’d like a simple query box like normal on Amazon, but a pulldown menu that allows you to specify one of three depths of search:

Surface — Searching only the title, author, publisher, and year of publication. The absolute minimal amount of information available on a book.

Shallow — Searching title, author, publisher, year of publication, tags, publisher’s description, and editorial reviews. More information, mostly dedicated to general descriptions of the book and its theme.

Deep — Searching everything — vital stats, reviews, tags, excerpts — EVERYTHING. Including the actual excerpts or entire text from the book.

As it stands, it’s not easy to do a general search. The data pool’s just too big. But if you had a way to easily slice that data into three depths as I described above — man, the searching would get so much easier. (And I’m not afraid to tell you I’d spend most of my time in the surface search.)

Strangely enough for all that Amazon’s search drives me around the bend, I love love love the Amazon ECS. Easy to use, great documentation, malleable results. And the most recent version, if I recall correctly, supported tag search. I wonder if I could use it to get some idea of depth…

I haven’t been doing much nerdy on ResearchBuzz, but in my job I have been spending time with Amazon ECS and I quite like it. The Amazon ECS — Amazon E-Commerce Service — is a way to search Amazon’s listings and merchants, either in toto or one at a time. You can get more information at http://aws.amazon.com (click on the “Amazon E-Commerce Service” link on the left.)

I bring this up because a new version of Amazon ECS has been announced. This new version introduces a few new variables and includes lots of coverage of Amazon tags. I have mentioned Amazon’s tags recently.

If you want to get a sense of how popular Amazon’s tags are, check out the tag cloud at http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/cloud/ref=tag_cld_cl_icld_sm/104-7921062-4880723?ie=UTF8&length=250 . See that &length=250 at the end? It’s editable; I found it worked to set the number up to 1000. The resulting huge cloud goes from 1080p to zen zombie zombies. Click on a tag for products tagged with that information and pointers to additional information, like forum discussions.

I was pleased with Amazon ECS before, but I can see a whole new set of experiments now that tags are so extensively supported. There’s not enough time in the day…

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I think I have mentioned before that Amazon’s search engine gives me a rash. But yet the site contains so much information I can’t help using it. And despite the fact that Amazon’s regular search engine bothers me a lot, there are other offerings on the site that are making it more and more fun to use. Forum threads, for example, are now available by RSS feeds.

You may have noticed at the bottom of Amazon’s product pages there are links to forum threads. Sometimes all you need to do to find interesting discussions to monitor is find a related book, then look at the discussions going on around that book. Other times you might want to do a search outside Amazon for interesting threads. If you want to use Google to search Amazon for forum threads, here is your base search:

site:amazon.com inurl:forum

Add your keywords. Note also that Amazon has a forum for each tag that’s been used on Amazon, and often they don’t have any discussions around them. You can eliminate those by adding -inurl:tag to your search.

If you do a search like lactose intolerant site:amazon.com inurl:forum you’ll see a couple dozen results covering everything from parenting to making yogurt to, for some reason, Sony. Once you’ve found a topic of interest that you’d like to monitor, look for the RSS feed link and symbol in the right nav. If you have an Amazon account you can also sign up to get e-mails when a forum thread updates.

I think for very technical, computer related discussions, I would still refer to Usenet, Yahoo Groups, or Google Groups. But I think for more consumer-oriented discussions or “everyday life” discussions, this’ll be the place I start. Amazon has a ton of traffic and has made it very easy for anyone to put in their two cents.

Now if I could just use the regular search engine without tearing all my hair out…