11 ms·

Tell HN: Amazon's book search is gamed, keyword-stuffed, and inaccurate

146 points by vanilla-almond 5y ago

In short: horrible. I know this won't be new to most of you, but I wanted to share an anecdote (and a rant!) I have a friend who has brain cancer. I went to Amazon searching for books on the subject and I typed ‘brain cancer’ in the search (books) field. What did I find? Amazon UK As you scroll down page 1 of the search results, you find examples of “brain cancer notebook” or “brain cancer journal”. Empty notebooks with nothing to do with the subject. Amazon US Same search term. The search results were even worse. The “no content” ranked even higher on the first page of search page. Here is a screenshot of the search results for Amazon UK and US: https://i.postimg.cc/JRDkSGRK/amazon-book-search.jpg Try an Amazon book search for “Ukraine war” on Amazon UK and US and already the search results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks seizing the opportunity to profit from war (these blank notebooks are not donating to charities, they are simply seizing on keyword searches). The reason so many of these "no content" notebooks pollute the books category is because of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service: a print-on-demand service. It has opened the flood gates to “low content” or “no content” journals and notebooks which allows "creators" publish hundreds of notebook titles. These are simply empty, lined or blank print-on-demand notebooks. Amazon includes these in book search results rather than confine these items to it’s own search category. You can find hundreds of YouTube videos on how to publish “no content” notebooks via KDP and how to game Amazon search results to rank higher. I know Amazon simply doesn’t care, but I had to rant. I might be overreacting by the results I saw and I won’t be offended if you say so :-)

Bostonian 5y ago
Best wishes to your friend. I have noticed Amazon's poor book search results too. If you search "fortran" in books you see some irrelevant content (the biography "When Fortran was Queen" is not what people are looking for) on the first page of 24 books, and the quality falls after that. There would be probably be volunteers who could curate common Amazon book searches in their area of interest. I think this would help Amazon's sales, because I doubt that many people buy the dumb notebooks mentioned.
- wenc 5y ago
  Just did a search for Fortran. Seems right to me. Can you link to your search?
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  Amazon makes a lot of money selling ads these days so it might not be in their best interest, short term, to make search actually be better.
ranieuwe 5y ago
s/book// and you are still pretty accurate.
brudgers 5y ago
Amazon sells ads. The overhead for ad inventory is lower than for physical goods. The margins are higher as well.
fxtentacle 5y ago
Amazon is the new ebay. I still remember the good old times when ebay was mostly honest regular people selling used stuff online. Then "powersellers" appeared. Then things get automated. By now, e-bay is mostly new items but with horrible service and almost no safety checks. That's also why GPU scalpers love both ebay and Amazon Marketplace.
- bovermyer 5y ago
  I dunno, I'm still able to find good deals on used books and games on eBay.
- Wingman4l7 5y ago
  The used folks definitely still exist, you just have to be judicious with your search filters, unfortunately.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  >with horrible service and almost no safety checks So e-bay was crypto before crypto.
  - kleer001 5y ago
    technically cryptocurriencies have no service and no safety checks, and that's the selling point
- RajT88 5y ago
  You have to use the advanced search to find those folks now. When I am looking for good deals on used stuff, I focus on lots of items, sorted by most recently listed. Always buy-it-now.
- na85 5y ago
  >That's also why GPU scalpers love both ebay and Amazon Marketplace. Maybe in 2030 I'll be able to buy an RX 6800 XT for MSRP.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ufo 5y ago
Even without the obvious scams like the empty notebooks, searching for books about a specific disease is a gamble. The majority are crap from snake oil salesmen, promising miracle cures or "10 truths your doctor doesn't want you to know".
nestorD 5y ago
I found this website to be great when looking for new books: https://findabooktoread.com/ https://findabooktoread.com/
8note 5y ago
Having recently used amazon search to find a book by name, it seems to work well enough; the book came up as the first result I think it's a search tool and not a browse/explore tool. You should already know which thing you want by the time you ask amazon to find it for you
- blue1 5y ago
  My recent experience is that some books are unfindable by search, even if you enter the exact title. Only ISBN works. In other words, amazon search totally sucks. To the point that I find easier to search amazon via google ("now you have another problem").
- null_object 5y ago
  > I think it's a search tool and not a browse/explore tool. You should already know which thing you want by the time you ask amazon to find it for you I was recently searching Amazon for a specific classic Kindle book with the exact title, author and publisher (Penguin Classics) and still got a list of maybe 500 completely garbage versions that had obviously gamed the algorithm. Even finally finding the “correct” version in the list, and clicking on that led me to a fake version of the book.
  - buescher 5y ago
    I've had exactly that problem and had to resort to searching other booksellers for the Penguin edition of something in the public domain.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Before Amazon was Amazon, I had described to Jeff my own vision for the browse/explore "tool", which would have been based on US Library of Congress classifications (remember, not-yet-Amazon was only a US company at that point). You would have been able to "dial in/out" on progressively finer and coarser categorization, and switch to "adjacent" LoC classifications. Sadly, the source of the company's bibliographic data at the time flattened the LoC 3-level heirarchy in a way that made it impossible (or at least very difficult) to recover, and I had to abandon the idea. I still think it would have been lovely.
pg5 5y ago
On a similar note, I've found so many items on Amazon are "review hijacked". You'll see 5 star reviews, but when you look at the actual reviews, they are all for a different product. They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product. This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.
- chucksta 5y ago
  I went out of my way once to contact support for this, there is no way to report it directly and got a very strong sense that they intentionally don't care
  - Chirael 5y ago
    That is the best indicator of a monopoly that I can see; you see it with utility and cable companies as well, basically they are not worried at all that the customer will go somewhere else because there really is very little competition
    - wojciii 5y ago
      I just stopped buying Chinese crap from Amazon - this happened after they had issues with my credit card and of course I had to pay to fix it. This happended 6 months ago and I have been happier since. My main problem is that there are no alternatives to buying ebooks. In terms of how easy it's to buy and transfer to the device.
    - soco 5y ago
      I don't even remember the last time I bought from Amazon (or eBay for that matter). It's simply not worth the hassle. At this point even Wish is more trustworthy, so I see no reason to still buy from those - if you need cheap (and often bad) stuff you can get it directly from the source, and otherwise, welcome to the rest of the world of online shopping.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Nextgrid 5y ago
Everything will be gamed as long as there are no penalties for doing so.
- meetups323 5y ago
  Everything will be gamed. Penalties are part of the game.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Well the idea is that penalties should be high enough to not only offset any gains you'd get from breaking the rules but leave you in a worse position to deter breaking the rules to begin with.
elcapitan 5y ago
I noticed on German Amazon that book search got inexplicably bad recently. Like as if they swapped out their algorithms for some trivial matching query. Now I can only find books by typing the exact title. Before that, I used Amazon to explore current books even as a replacement for the library catalog because the results were much better.
throwra620 5y ago
unmole 5y ago
Thankfully, Amazon India seems to be free from this so far. Searching for brain cancer returns a self-help book for dealing with cancer, academic publications for cancer diagnosis and a memoir of a brain cancer survivor. I was always puzzled by the negative experiences that I usually see in HN because I have literally never had a bad experience with Amazon. Sure, a few shipments I received were damaged but they were promptly replaced with minimal hassle. I guess the difference is Amazon is still trying to capture market share in India while it's already established itself as a Behemoth in the US.
- bombcar 5y ago
  I'm wondering - did you search Amazon India for "brain cancer" in English? What happens if you search the same term in Hindi? It could also be that there's no point in the notebook scalpers "publishing" in India because the amount "made" is so low. But a few sales in the USA could be worth it.
  - unmole 5y ago
    > I'm wondering - did you search Amazon India for "brain cancer" in English? Yes. > What happens if you search the same term in Hindi? No results specifically about brain cancer, but books about the brain and books about cancer. Some of them are selling quack cures for cancer, which while concerning is nothing like what OP described
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  I agree with the last paragraph (also Indian, also get similar results btw). I don't have the experience of Amazon having a lot of scummy/scammy products, and the reviews for the products I've purchased have generally matched my own experience. > I guess the difference is Amazon is still trying to capture market share in India while it's already established itself as a Behemoth in the US. Yeah, and I think that affects this (positively) in two ways: (i) Amazon cares more about being seen as a legitimate player and not looking worse than the competition at this stage, (ii) it takes time for the scammers to find the best ways to game the platform, and they're still figuring it out.
buescher 5y ago
On a related note, Amazon's recommendation engine was terrifyingly excellent in 1999-2000 or so, to the point I was probably spending more on books than I should have been at the time. It has been on a long downhill trend since some point after that, around 2000 or 2001, when it started insistently recommending me the current Harry Potter bestseller instead of things I was actually interested in.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  One of the standard textbooks on invertebrates is Giribet's Invertebrate Tree of Life. You order that book from Amazon and get spammed with bad Kabbalah books. How does that happen, even, someone interested in hardcore zoology would be the last person to buy something about plastic religiosity. The current state of affairs is not just bad, it's infuriating, and it used to be much better!
  - bombcar 5y ago
    "Tree of Life" is obviously what it is going off of, as that's a term outside of invertebrates. Clearly whatever "artificial stupidity" they have running doesn't really care about matching that well. I bet https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tree+of+life&i=stripbooks https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tree+of+life&i=stripbooks is basically what you get.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Those recommendations are being triggered by the phrase "Tree of Life": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(Kabbalah) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(Kabbalah)
- PaulKeeble 5y ago
  Same, their recommendation engine was incredible and it helped me find so many books I loved. I don't bother with the recommendations today its full of garbage. I have really noticed how bad the search has become in the past 6 months as well, its very hard to find what you are looking for on Amazon, many products listed don't contain the keywords you listed at all.
RajT88 5y ago
The problem exists in some form all over Amazon. Try searching for a free public domain kindle ebook. You will have to scroll through pages of paid "special editions" which the "authors" have made no real changes to before you can find the free public domain copies.
randcraw 5y ago
Exactly. For years now, I find stuff at Amazon by LEAVING the Amazon site and then searching Google for "OBJECTNAME Amazon". That circumvents most of Amazon's filters, revealing many more products like out-of-print versions of books that Amazon wants to hide or deprecate.
throwawayboise 5y ago
Yeah Amazon is worthless to me for the last few years. The reviews are fake, the search is terrible, and many of the products are counterfeit or resold/returned items. When I realized that I canceled my prime subscription and now when I search for products I explicitly exclude any results from amazon.* domains.
keitmo 5y ago
Cory Doctorow's take: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns
tuetuopay 5y ago
This is a trainwreck. I just tested on Amazon France. Typing "brain cancer" (in plain english) yielded the same thing as your screenshot, expect there was an actual book about overcoming the chemo once cured. Typing "cancer du cerveau" (en français dans le texte, literal translation of brain cancer) is even more a dumpster fire than what you describe, it's appalling... Here are the results in actual order: 1. A notebook, same as yours 2. An actual book (yay!) about breast cancer (how?!?) 3. A Yuka guide book about healthy food 4. A book about "the new happiness formula", positive thinking etc... 5. 50 habits of successful people, how to automate your career (now I'm confused) 6. Healthy eating shit 7. Confidence boost guide 8. Story of a cop that had blood cancer 9. Digestive system guide 10. Anxiety and stress guide 11. Miracles of taking a cold shower against procrastination (you're just messing with me, right?) 12. Alt-medicine crap 13. Positive thinking book 14. Biohacking neuroscience to combat distraction (I swear I'm not making this up) 15. Anticancer (actual title) What can I say... At least I got mostly books in the books section?
- leephillips 5y ago
  Could at least a few of these be the results for “brain” or “cancer” as separate terms? Does Amazon have phrase searching, so you can actually search for “brain cancer”?
jrockway 5y ago
Amazon's keyword search is quite broken, and vendors exploit that. I have an HN comment somewhere where I was talking about an experiment I did; I took some of the descriptions that exploit keyword matching, and asked GPT-3 my actual question. I think the specific example was waterproof LED strips. I noticed that many LED strips had the description "not waterproof" somewhere in the product name. If you search Amazon for "waterproof LED strip" (which BTW, I don't think is an actual thing), it returns all of the self-declared "non-waterproof" items, which is the exploit. I set up a GPT-3 completion where I asked questions like "is an Amazon item with the description 'foobar 12V LED light strip non-waterproof' waterproof?" For everthing I tested, GPT-3 returned completions like "No, of course it's not waterproof." If Amazon used ML like this to return search results, it would be slightly harder for vendors to exploit, and search would be much better. (But of course, sometimes it would return nothing when the user would have been happy with a non-waterproof LED light strip. I think that's a good thing, their Revenue Department probably disagrees though. If someone who wants waterproof lights gets one that's not waterproof and doesn't return it after paying their credit card bill, then "the system works".)
throwaway984393 5y ago
Amazon is the Dollar General of the internet. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/11/569815331/loving-and-hating-dollar-general-in-rural-america https://www.npr.org/2017/12/11/569815331/loving-and-hating-d... https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/dollar-general-opposition/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/dollar-general-oppos...
deleted 5y ago
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kabdib 5y ago
I just searched for some works by authors I like (some well known, some pretty obscure). Amazon's search results seem better than they were a year ago, when I last tried this; back then it seemed like the results were half promotional garbage. It might be better now. It's still not great, and I still use search on Amazon's site with reluctance and mistrust.
wrthfl 5y ago
I'm using bookfinder for exactly this reason...
deanCommie 5y ago
This is 100% a function of selection and the number of available eyes for bad actors to try to game. Rampant unstoppable capitalism and all that. Amazon.ca does not have this problem - search "brain cancer" under books and you get 1. BRAIN CANCER: Step By Step Guide On Everything You Need To Know About Brain Cancer Causes, Signs, Symptoms And Treatment 2. Fuck Brain Cancer : 2021 Planner: Schedule Organizer / Weekly Calendar 3. Glioblastoma - A guide for patients and loved ones: Your guide to glioblastoma and anaplastic astrocytoma brain tumours
- enjoyyourlife 5y ago
  Result #2 in your example has that problem
impostervt 5y ago
I publish books on KDP. Not low/no content, though. I really wish amazon would charge $5/month/book you put up on KDP. It would eliminate a TON of garbage, and any half decent book would more than make up the $5/month to pay for itself.
GCA10 5y ago
A great deal of Amazon's store has moved from the old "customer obsession" principle of the early years to a new principle of "revenue obsession." Brad Stone's second book about Amazon ("Amazon Unbound") does a refreshingly candid and detailed job of explaining how this switch happened. It's tucked away in Chapter 10, I believe, and it never got as much media pickup as I would have expected. For me, at least, grasping the extent of this transformation made it a lot easier to understand what I kept encountering.
- julienchastang 5y ago
  > A great deal of Amazon's store has moved from the old "customer obsession" principle of the early years to a new principle of "revenue obsession." I am finding this to be increasingly true of the web in general and it is getting more difficult to locate things (books, products, whatever) of high quality value. Do you want the best search results or the one that can be most easily monetized?
fullshark 5y ago
It's sad how Amazon doesn't care about its flagship product line: book sales and the kindle. Just a low margin monopoly it maintains, thinking about other growth opportunities instead I guess.
mnd999 5y ago
Honestly, just buy your books elsewhere. Stop treating Amazon as your go to site for everything, its not actually that great. Rewards sites that are actually good at this, and cancel prime, you don’t need it.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
That's bad. I remember about eight years ago, I ordered an out-of-print book on AMZN, which was fulfilled by their book service thingy where antiquarian bookstores are organized. Don't know if that's still a thing. That's the one and only purchase I've ever made using AMZN ;) But tbh, I don't know what exactly you're expecting going to AMZN or GOOG for reading tips.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  For out of print books, abebooks.com is much better. Better prices and much larger selection, even though I think it's actually owned by Amazon now.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
It’s not just Amazon’s book search, it’s Amazon’s everything search.
superasn 5y ago
I more thing I hate about amazon search is that they deliberately fuck up the search results when you sort by price. Like if you are looking for a graphics card (on amazon.in) and you sort it by price then relevance totally goes out of the window. It will start showing results for fans, cables and everything else with the first card on 20th page. Sometimes the search results don't have the word in title description. It's so annoying. P.S. also the number of search results drastically decreases by applying the sorting. How can sorting something reduce the results by half.
- beeboop 5y ago
  Price sorting on Amazon has never worked. Never. It's always been completely useless and I can only imagine that it's useless by design.
- glitcher 5y ago
  Yep, and because of this I tend to only sort by price from high to low for things like graphics cards. It's faster to skip pages on the highest priced items than it is on the lowest.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > Like if you are looking for a graphics card (on amazon.in) and you sort it by price then relevance totally goes out of the window. To be fair here, that's the reasonable way to handle this. If I want to sort by price and Amazon orders the result by something random and then maybe price, it's far worse. Amazon could of course improve this by allowing more search filters, but the current state is definetly better than adding something like "relevancy" when all I want is the cheapest items.
mynameisash 5y ago
Several years back, Facebook courted me to help them "combat abuse" in its many forms on their platform. But then I discovered that it was all bullshit, and they just wanted me to join them for their mundane ML/data engineering work such as doing video recommendations. They have a serious abuse problem but apparently choose to ignore it. So it goes with Amazon. They have many issues with useless reviews, bad actors gaming the system, inaccurate descriptions, and so on. I get that it's a hard problem, but it's not like this is a mom & pop shop here; Amazon is a $1.5T company with incredible resources at its disposal. That they haven't made this a fringe, near negligible annoyance on their retail site seems to me a strong indicator that they either don't really care or they actually benefit from it in some way.
- flak48 5y ago
  If solving a problem isn't going to 1) move the stock price up and /or 2) move a metric that gets someone promoted or 3) help avoid significant negative publicity in some way, it's never going to get solved
  - mynameisash 5y ago
    I agree with your somewhat cynical take. What's even more frustrating is that Amazon has been a company that ostensibly ignores those things and focuses only on customers. (I worked there years ago, and I genuinely liked that we could answer design questions simply by asking, "What would our customers want?") Focus on customers and the stock price goes up and negative perception go away. This should be an absolute no-brainer: What do Amazon's customers want? Better, more trustworthy, not fraudulent reviews. Search results that reflect the intent and not gamified FBA/3P products. Confidence that whatever they buy will be what they want and will last.
spansoa 5y ago
I recall 'window shopping' on Amazon for certain products where I would take notes of the price, and when I went to buy them a week later they were all hiked. It's as if Amazon knew someone would buy them eventually, so they hiked the prices. My new strategy (as a result of this) is to avoid window shopping and simply buy things on-the-fly without prior research. I know it sucks Amazon has gamed me, but I get cheaper prices as a result!
servytor 5y ago
Personally, I wish Amazon always showed 'People also looked at ...' and 'People also bought ...'. It is so useful! But it seems like it only shows up for certain things, and refreshing doesn't change the chance of it being displayed.
goodgoblin 5y ago
Sorry about your friend. I bought some books yesterday from Powells - a good bit more expensive - and I won't get them for 2 weeks - but I feel good about it - and will give me more time to read the books I already bought and haven't finished. Could just be time to move on from amazon... they had a nice run
jmyeet 5y ago
The lesson you should take from this is just how hard search actually is. Some like to hate on Google Search and extol the virtues of DDG. I don’t know what Google they’re using because mine is fine. Sure there’s SEO, affiliate link farms and astroturfing but with a prize so large it’s amazing it works at all. These Amazon problems are hardly new and it’s kind of embarrassing that simple ones like swapping out a product is still a big problem a decade later. But it also demonstrates that effective Search would touch policy enforcement, automatic and manual review, seller fraud and so on.
PlatzmaPritzma 5y ago
Try to search it in Books rather than All. >> results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks seizing the opportunity to profit from war Come on... Do you expect an AI to follow mainstream media and change it's search results accordingly?
nixass 5y ago
I mean you have filters on the left pane, or just add "book" to your query. Just did it with "book" on .co.uk and voila - books only
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Amazon is the world's most high tech dollar store
elorant 5y ago
Well, I did a search on "Ukraine war" on US Amazon and in the first page there wasn't a single notebook. All results were either for books or movies related to the subject. Screenshot of my results: https://postimg.cc/4Y8mK7rG https://postimg.cc/4Y8mK7rG
- TMWNN 5y ago
  I got similar results as you.
- vanilla-almond 5y ago
  I typed "Ukraine war" in the 'books' filter of the Amazon UK search bar. Here are the search results for the first page of search: https://i.postimg.cc/YCF2QnWL/amazon-uk-search-for-ukraine-war.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/YCF2QnWL/amazon-uk-search-for-ukraine-w... I assumed Amazon US search would be similar, but that does not appear to be the case. I apologise for writing: "Try an Amazon book search for “Ukraine war” on Amazon UK and US and already the search results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks. This is only true of Amazon UK (see screenshot above). Thank you for posting your results and I apologise for making a wrong assumption, (I still hate Amazon search though!)
kcartlidge 5y ago
Totally agree. Except for fiction or for very tightly specified searches Amazon is useless at search. If you want to read more about it, though, look for the A9 search engine.
wenc 5y ago
Try searching for "brain cancer" on Amazon US. Then click on the Books category. The results actually make sense. If you leave the filter on all, it will rank by the most popular items, and I can't imagine "brain cancer" being a common search term. Because the medical term for it is "brain tumor" and if you search the medical term you'll actually end up with book results that make sense. This seems to be much ado about nothing.
mcintyre1994 5y ago
I find it really annoying what authors do with their book name field on Amazon. IDK if the algorithm actually rewards this but everyone seems to act like it does. - The Couple at No 9: The unputdownable and nail-biting Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month - The Push: The Richard & Judy Book Club Choice & Sunday Times Bestseller With a Shocking Twist - Everything is Beautiful: the most uplifting, heartwarming read of 2021: 'the most uplifting book of the year' Good Housekeeping As an aside that last one shows as “#1 Best Seller in Antique & Collectable Glass & Glassware” so I guess there’s a whole other scam going on there.

Bostonian 5y ago

Best wishes to your friend. I have noticed Amazon's poor book search results too. If you search "fortran" in books you see some irrelevant content (the biography "When Fortran was Queen" is not what people are looking for) on the first page of 24 books, and the quality falls after that. There would be probably be volunteers who could curate common Amazon book searches in their area of interest. I think this would help Amazon's sales, because I doubt that many people buy the dumb notebooks mentioned.

wenc 5y ago
Just did a search for Fortran. Seems right to me. Can you link to your search?
JaimeThompson 5y ago
Amazon makes a lot of money selling ads these days so it might not be in their best interest, short term, to make search actually be better.

ranieuwe 5y ago

s/book// and you are still pretty accurate.

brudgers 5y ago

Amazon sells ads. The overhead for ad inventory is lower than for physical goods. The margins are higher as well.

fxtentacle 5y ago

Amazon is the new ebay. I still remember the good old times when ebay was mostly honest regular people selling used stuff online. Then "powersellers" appeared. Then things get automated. By now, e-bay is mostly new items but with horrible service and almost no safety checks. That's also why GPU scalpers love both ebay and Amazon Marketplace.

bovermyer 5y ago
I dunno, I'm still able to find good deals on used books and games on eBay.
Wingman4l7 5y ago
The used folks definitely still exist, you just have to be judicious with your search filters, unfortunately.
JaimeThompson 5y ago
>with horrible service and almost no safety checks So e-bay was crypto before crypto.
- kleer001 5y ago
  technically cryptocurriencies have no service and no safety checks, and that's the selling point
RajT88 5y ago
You have to use the advanced search to find those folks now. When I am looking for good deals on used stuff, I focus on lots of items, sorted by most recently listed. Always buy-it-now.
na85 5y ago
>That's also why GPU scalpers love both ebay and Amazon Marketplace. Maybe in 2030 I'll be able to buy an RX 6800 XT for MSRP.
deleted 5y ago
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ufo 5y ago

Even without the obvious scams like the empty notebooks, searching for books about a specific disease is a gamble. The majority are crap from snake oil salesmen, promising miracle cures or "10 truths your doctor doesn't want you to know".

nestorD 5y ago

I found this website to be great when looking for new books: https://findabooktoread.com/ https://findabooktoread.com/

8note 5y ago

Having recently used amazon search to find a book by name, it seems to work well enough; the book came up as the first result I think it's a search tool and not a browse/explore tool. You should already know which thing you want by the time you ask amazon to find it for you

blue1 5y ago
My recent experience is that some books are unfindable by search, even if you enter the exact title. Only ISBN works. In other words, amazon search totally sucks. To the point that I find easier to search amazon via google ("now you have another problem").
null_object 5y ago
> I think it's a search tool and not a browse/explore tool. You should already know which thing you want by the time you ask amazon to find it for you I was recently searching Amazon for a specific classic Kindle book with the exact title, author and publisher (Penguin Classics) and still got a list of maybe 500 completely garbage versions that had obviously gamed the algorithm. Even finally finding the “correct” version in the list, and clicking on that led me to a fake version of the book.
- buescher 5y ago
  I've had exactly that problem and had to resort to searching other booksellers for the Penguin edition of something in the public domain.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Before Amazon was Amazon, I had described to Jeff my own vision for the browse/explore "tool", which would have been based on US Library of Congress classifications (remember, not-yet-Amazon was only a US company at that point). You would have been able to "dial in/out" on progressively finer and coarser categorization, and switch to "adjacent" LoC classifications. Sadly, the source of the company's bibliographic data at the time flattened the LoC 3-level heirarchy in a way that made it impossible (or at least very difficult) to recover, and I had to abandon the idea. I still think it would have been lovely.

pg5 5y ago

On a similar note, I've found so many items on Amazon are "review hijacked". You'll see 5 star reviews, but when you look at the actual reviews, they are all for a different product. They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product. This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.

chucksta 5y ago
I went out of my way once to contact support for this, there is no way to report it directly and got a very strong sense that they intentionally don't care
- Chirael 5y ago
  That is the best indicator of a monopoly that I can see; you see it with utility and cable companies as well, basically they are not worried at all that the customer will go somewhere else because there really is very little competition
  - wojciii 5y ago
    I just stopped buying Chinese crap from Amazon - this happened after they had issues with my credit card and of course I had to pay to fix it. This happended 6 months ago and I have been happier since. My main problem is that there are no alternatives to buying ebooks. In terms of how easy it's to buy and transfer to the device.
  - soco 5y ago
    I don't even remember the last time I bought from Amazon (or eBay for that matter). It's simply not worth the hassle. At this point even Wish is more trustworthy, so I see no reason to still buy from those - if you need cheap (and often bad) stuff you can get it directly from the source, and otherwise, welcome to the rest of the world of online shopping.
- deleted 5y ago
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Nextgrid 5y ago

Everything will be gamed as long as there are no penalties for doing so.

meetups323 5y ago
Everything will be gamed. Penalties are part of the game.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Well the idea is that penalties should be high enough to not only offset any gains you'd get from breaking the rules but leave you in a worse position to deter breaking the rules to begin with.

elcapitan 5y ago

I noticed on German Amazon that book search got inexplicably bad recently. Like as if they swapped out their algorithms for some trivial matching query. Now I can only find books by typing the exact title. Before that, I used Amazon to explore current books even as a replacement for the library catalog because the results were much better.

throwra620 5y ago

unmole 5y ago

Thankfully, Amazon India seems to be free from this so far. Searching for brain cancer returns a self-help book for dealing with cancer, academic publications for cancer diagnosis and a memoir of a brain cancer survivor. I was always puzzled by the negative experiences that I usually see in HN because I have literally never had a bad experience with Amazon. Sure, a few shipments I received were damaged but they were promptly replaced with minimal hassle. I guess the difference is Amazon is still trying to capture market share in India while it's already established itself as a Behemoth in the US.

bombcar 5y ago
I'm wondering - did you search Amazon India for "brain cancer" in English? What happens if you search the same term in Hindi? It could also be that there's no point in the notebook scalpers "publishing" in India because the amount "made" is so low. But a few sales in the USA could be worth it.
- unmole 5y ago
  > I'm wondering - did you search Amazon India for "brain cancer" in English? Yes. > What happens if you search the same term in Hindi? No results specifically about brain cancer, but books about the brain and books about cancer. Some of them are selling quack cures for cancer, which while concerning is nothing like what OP described
sundarurfriend 5y ago
I agree with the last paragraph (also Indian, also get similar results btw). I don't have the experience of Amazon having a lot of scummy/scammy products, and the reviews for the products I've purchased have generally matched my own experience. > I guess the difference is Amazon is still trying to capture market share in India while it's already established itself as a Behemoth in the US. Yeah, and I think that affects this (positively) in two ways: (i) Amazon cares more about being seen as a legitimate player and not looking worse than the competition at this stage, (ii) it takes time for the scammers to find the best ways to game the platform, and they're still figuring it out.

buescher 5y ago

On a related note, Amazon's recommendation engine was terrifyingly excellent in 1999-2000 or so, to the point I was probably spending more on books than I should have been at the time. It has been on a long downhill trend since some point after that, around 2000 or 2001, when it started insistently recommending me the current Harry Potter bestseller instead of things I was actually interested in.

HarryHirsch 5y ago
One of the standard textbooks on invertebrates is Giribet's Invertebrate Tree of Life. You order that book from Amazon and get spammed with bad Kabbalah books. How does that happen, even, someone interested in hardcore zoology would be the last person to buy something about plastic religiosity. The current state of affairs is not just bad, it's infuriating, and it used to be much better!
- bombcar 5y ago
  "Tree of Life" is obviously what it is going off of, as that's a term outside of invertebrates. Clearly whatever "artificial stupidity" they have running doesn't really care about matching that well. I bet https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tree+of+life&i=stripbooks https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tree+of+life&i=stripbooks is basically what you get.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Those recommendations are being triggered by the phrase "Tree of Life": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(Kabbalah) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(Kabbalah)
PaulKeeble 5y ago
Same, their recommendation engine was incredible and it helped me find so many books I loved. I don't bother with the recommendations today its full of garbage. I have really noticed how bad the search has become in the past 6 months as well, its very hard to find what you are looking for on Amazon, many products listed don't contain the keywords you listed at all.

RajT88 5y ago

The problem exists in some form all over Amazon. Try searching for a free public domain kindle ebook. You will have to scroll through pages of paid "special editions" which the "authors" have made no real changes to before you can find the free public domain copies.

randcraw 5y ago

Exactly. For years now, I find stuff at Amazon by LEAVING the Amazon site and then searching Google for "OBJECTNAME Amazon". That circumvents most of Amazon's filters, revealing many more products like out-of-print versions of books that Amazon wants to hide or deprecate.

throwawayboise 5y ago

Yeah Amazon is worthless to me for the last few years. The reviews are fake, the search is terrible, and many of the products are counterfeit or resold/returned items. When I realized that I canceled my prime subscription and now when I search for products I explicitly exclude any results from amazon.* domains.

keitmo 5y ago

Cory Doctorow's take: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns

tuetuopay 5y ago

This is a trainwreck. I just tested on Amazon France. Typing "brain cancer" (in plain english) yielded the same thing as your screenshot, expect there was an actual book about overcoming the chemo once cured. Typing "cancer du cerveau" (en français dans le texte, literal translation of brain cancer) is even more a dumpster fire than what you describe, it's appalling... Here are the results in actual order: 1. A notebook, same as yours 2. An actual book (yay!) about breast cancer (how?!?) 3. A Yuka guide book about healthy food 4. A book about "the new happiness formula", positive thinking etc... 5. 50 habits of successful people, how to automate your career (now I'm confused) 6. Healthy eating shit 7. Confidence boost guide 8. Story of a cop that had blood cancer 9. Digestive system guide 10. Anxiety and stress guide 11. Miracles of taking a cold shower against procrastination (you're just messing with me, right?) 12. Alt-medicine crap 13. Positive thinking book 14. Biohacking neuroscience to combat distraction (I swear I'm not making this up) 15. Anticancer (actual title) What can I say... At least I got mostly books in the books section?

leephillips 5y ago
Could at least a few of these be the results for “brain” or “cancer” as separate terms? Does Amazon have phrase searching, so you can actually search for “brain cancer”?

jrockway 5y ago

Amazon's keyword search is quite broken, and vendors exploit that. I have an HN comment somewhere where I was talking about an experiment I did; I took some of the descriptions that exploit keyword matching, and asked GPT-3 my actual question. I think the specific example was waterproof LED strips. I noticed that many LED strips had the description "not waterproof" somewhere in the product name. If you search Amazon for "waterproof LED strip" (which BTW, I don't think is an actual thing), it returns all of the self-declared "non-waterproof" items, which is the exploit. I set up a GPT-3 completion where I asked questions like "is an Amazon item with the description 'foobar 12V LED light strip non-waterproof' waterproof?" For everthing I tested, GPT-3 returned completions like "No, of course it's not waterproof." If Amazon used ML like this to return search results, it would be slightly harder for vendors to exploit, and search would be much better. (But of course, sometimes it would return nothing when the user would have been happy with a non-waterproof LED light strip. I think that's a good thing, their Revenue Department probably disagrees though. If someone who wants waterproof lights gets one that's not waterproof and doesn't return it after paying their credit card bill, then "the system works".)

throwaway984393 5y ago

Amazon is the Dollar General of the internet. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/11/569815331/loving-and-hating-dollar-general-in-rural-america https://www.npr.org/2017/12/11/569815331/loving-and-hating-d... https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/dollar-general-opposition/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/dollar-general-oppos...

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kabdib 5y ago

I just searched for some works by authors I like (some well known, some pretty obscure). Amazon's search results seem better than they were a year ago, when I last tried this; back then it seemed like the results were half promotional garbage. It might be better now. It's still not great, and I still use search on Amazon's site with reluctance and mistrust.

wrthfl 5y ago

I'm using bookfinder for exactly this reason...

deanCommie 5y ago

This is 100% a function of selection and the number of available eyes for bad actors to try to game. Rampant unstoppable capitalism and all that. Amazon.ca does not have this problem - search "brain cancer" under books and you get 1. BRAIN CANCER: Step By Step Guide On Everything You Need To Know About Brain Cancer Causes, Signs, Symptoms And Treatment 2. Fuck Brain Cancer : 2021 Planner: Schedule Organizer / Weekly Calendar 3. Glioblastoma - A guide for patients and loved ones: Your guide to glioblastoma and anaplastic astrocytoma brain tumours

enjoyyourlife 5y ago
Result #2 in your example has that problem

impostervt 5y ago

I publish books on KDP. Not low/no content, though. I really wish amazon would charge $5/month/book you put up on KDP. It would eliminate a TON of garbage, and any half decent book would more than make up the $5/month to pay for itself.

GCA10 5y ago

A great deal of Amazon's store has moved from the old "customer obsession" principle of the early years to a new principle of "revenue obsession." Brad Stone's second book about Amazon ("Amazon Unbound") does a refreshingly candid and detailed job of explaining how this switch happened. It's tucked away in Chapter 10, I believe, and it never got as much media pickup as I would have expected. For me, at least, grasping the extent of this transformation made it a lot easier to understand what I kept encountering.

julienchastang 5y ago
> A great deal of Amazon's store has moved from the old "customer obsession" principle of the early years to a new principle of "revenue obsession." I am finding this to be increasingly true of the web in general and it is getting more difficult to locate things (books, products, whatever) of high quality value. Do you want the best search results or the one that can be most easily monetized?

fullshark 5y ago

It's sad how Amazon doesn't care about its flagship product line: book sales and the kindle. Just a low margin monopoly it maintains, thinking about other growth opportunities instead I guess.

mnd999 5y ago

Honestly, just buy your books elsewhere. Stop treating Amazon as your go to site for everything, its not actually that great. Rewards sites that are actually good at this, and cancel prime, you don’t need it.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

That's bad. I remember about eight years ago, I ordered an out-of-print book on AMZN, which was fulfilled by their book service thingy where antiquarian bookstores are organized. Don't know if that's still a thing. That's the one and only purchase I've ever made using AMZN ;) But tbh, I don't know what exactly you're expecting going to AMZN or GOOG for reading tips.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
For out of print books, abebooks.com is much better. Better prices and much larger selection, even though I think it's actually owned by Amazon now.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

It’s not just Amazon’s book search, it’s Amazon’s everything search.

superasn 5y ago

I more thing I hate about amazon search is that they deliberately fuck up the search results when you sort by price. Like if you are looking for a graphics card (on amazon.in) and you sort it by price then relevance totally goes out of the window. It will start showing results for fans, cables and everything else with the first card on 20th page. Sometimes the search results don't have the word in title description. It's so annoying. P.S. also the number of search results drastically decreases by applying the sorting. How can sorting something reduce the results by half.

beeboop 5y ago
Price sorting on Amazon has never worked. Never. It's always been completely useless and I can only imagine that it's useless by design.
glitcher 5y ago
Yep, and because of this I tend to only sort by price from high to low for things like graphics cards. It's faster to skip pages on the highest priced items than it is on the lowest.
Sebb767 5y ago
> Like if you are looking for a graphics card (on amazon.in) and you sort it by price then relevance totally goes out of the window. To be fair here, that's the reasonable way to handle this. If I want to sort by price and Amazon orders the result by something random and then maybe price, it's far worse. Amazon could of course improve this by allowing more search filters, but the current state is definetly better than adding something like "relevancy" when all I want is the cheapest items.

mynameisash 5y ago

Several years back, Facebook courted me to help them "combat abuse" in its many forms on their platform. But then I discovered that it was all bullshit, and they just wanted me to join them for their mundane ML/data engineering work such as doing video recommendations. They have a serious abuse problem but apparently choose to ignore it. So it goes with Amazon. They have many issues with useless reviews, bad actors gaming the system, inaccurate descriptions, and so on. I get that it's a hard problem, but it's not like this is a mom & pop shop here; Amazon is a $1.5T company with incredible resources at its disposal. That they haven't made this a fringe, near negligible annoyance on their retail site seems to me a strong indicator that they either don't really care or they actually benefit from it in some way.

flak48 5y ago
If solving a problem isn't going to 1) move the stock price up and /or 2) move a metric that gets someone promoted or 3) help avoid significant negative publicity in some way, it's never going to get solved
- mynameisash 5y ago
  I agree with your somewhat cynical take. What's even more frustrating is that Amazon has been a company that ostensibly ignores those things and focuses only on customers. (I worked there years ago, and I genuinely liked that we could answer design questions simply by asking, "What would our customers want?") Focus on customers and the stock price goes up and negative perception go away. This should be an absolute no-brainer: What do Amazon's customers want? Better, more trustworthy, not fraudulent reviews. Search results that reflect the intent and not gamified FBA/3P products. Confidence that whatever they buy will be what they want and will last.

spansoa 5y ago

I recall 'window shopping' on Amazon for certain products where I would take notes of the price, and when I went to buy them a week later they were all hiked. It's as if Amazon knew someone would buy them eventually, so they hiked the prices. My new strategy (as a result of this) is to avoid window shopping and simply buy things on-the-fly without prior research. I know it sucks Amazon has gamed me, but I get cheaper prices as a result!

servytor 5y ago

Personally, I wish Amazon always showed 'People also looked at ...' and 'People also bought ...'. It is so useful! But it seems like it only shows up for certain things, and refreshing doesn't change the chance of it being displayed.

goodgoblin 5y ago

Sorry about your friend. I bought some books yesterday from Powells - a good bit more expensive - and I won't get them for 2 weeks - but I feel good about it - and will give me more time to read the books I already bought and haven't finished. Could just be time to move on from amazon... they had a nice run

jmyeet 5y ago

The lesson you should take from this is just how hard search actually is. Some like to hate on Google Search and extol the virtues of DDG. I don’t know what Google they’re using because mine is fine. Sure there’s SEO, affiliate link farms and astroturfing but with a prize so large it’s amazing it works at all. These Amazon problems are hardly new and it’s kind of embarrassing that simple ones like swapping out a product is still a big problem a decade later. But it also demonstrates that effective Search would touch policy enforcement, automatic and manual review, seller fraud and so on.

PlatzmaPritzma 5y ago

Try to search it in Books rather than All. >> results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks seizing the opportunity to profit from war Come on... Do you expect an AI to follow mainstream media and change it's search results accordingly?

nixass 5y ago

I mean you have filters on the left pane, or just add "book" to your query. Just did it with "book" on .co.uk and voila - books only

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Amazon is the world's most high tech dollar store

elorant 5y ago

Well, I did a search on "Ukraine war" on US Amazon and in the first page there wasn't a single notebook. All results were either for books or movies related to the subject. Screenshot of my results: https://postimg.cc/4Y8mK7rG https://postimg.cc/4Y8mK7rG

TMWNN 5y ago
I got similar results as you.
vanilla-almond 5y ago
I typed "Ukraine war" in the 'books' filter of the Amazon UK search bar. Here are the search results for the first page of search: https://i.postimg.cc/YCF2QnWL/amazon-uk-search-for-ukraine-war.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/YCF2QnWL/amazon-uk-search-for-ukraine-w... I assumed Amazon US search would be similar, but that does not appear to be the case. I apologise for writing: "Try an Amazon book search for “Ukraine war” on Amazon UK and US and already the search results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks. This is only true of Amazon UK (see screenshot above). Thank you for posting your results and I apologise for making a wrong assumption, (I still hate Amazon search though!)

kcartlidge 5y ago

Totally agree. Except for fiction or for very tightly specified searches Amazon is useless at search. If you want to read more about it, though, look for the A9 search engine.

wenc 5y ago

Try searching for "brain cancer" on Amazon US. Then click on the Books category. The results actually make sense. If you leave the filter on all, it will rank by the most popular items, and I can't imagine "brain cancer" being a common search term. Because the medical term for it is "brain tumor" and if you search the medical term you'll actually end up with book results that make sense. This seems to be much ado about nothing.

mcintyre1994 5y ago

I find it really annoying what authors do with their book name field on Amazon. IDK if the algorithm actually rewards this but everyone seems to act like it does. - The Couple at No 9: The unputdownable and nail-biting Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month - The Push: The Richard & Judy Book Club Choice & Sunday Times Bestseller With a Shocking Twist - Everything is Beautiful: the most uplifting, heartwarming read of 2021: 'the most uplifting book of the year' Good Housekeeping As an aside that last one shows as “#1 Best Seller in Antique & Collectable Glass & Glassware” so I guess there’s a whole other scam going on there.