Steve Fesenmaier writes “Avid Smith, a product manager in Seattle, knows of the hubbub surrounding Amazon.com’s new feature, Search Inside the Book. The service, introduced two weeks ago, allows people to do keyword searches within the text of books before buying them. Predictions about the future of books have been swirling in the air ever since.
Other worthy reads at business-standard.com, and CNET.
But it’s not that great…
Am I the only one here who is not thrilled with Amazon’s new feature? I have had numerous books where I knew the exact title and the book I was searching for was way, way down on the list. The number of results I get has skyrocketed to the point where it’s unmanageable. It just seems like everyone’s thrilled because it’s new and different, but I feel like it’s made my searches harder. I’m sure it will eventually be great, once their relevance ranking improves, but for now I’m tired of wading through only marginally relevant results to find the good stuff.
Re:But it’s not that great…
If you go to the book section of Amazon and click on search you can still search by author and title and it does not search inside the book. You only search inside the book if you run your search from the search box on the main page of Amazon.