According to C|Net News

Amazon.com on Thursday unveiled a new service that lets bookworms search through pages of thousands of books available on its online store.

The service, dubbed "Search Inside the Book," lets people type in any keyword and receive results for all the pages and titles of various books that contain that term. In the past, Amazon customers could search only by author name, title or keyword.

I am impressed by how in one move Amazon made their search feature utterly useless. I just tried to search for "open source xml" and "java xml" books on Amazon it and it was a fucking disaster. Even the top 10 hits that were returned were polluted with books that simply had the words "Java" or "XML" somewhere in the book. In fact almost every search I tried returned Oracle9i JDeveloper Handbook  in the top 10. If ever a feature needed to be turned off by default it is this one.


 

Friday, October 24, 2003 1:17:08 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
That's terrible. Terribly funny that it was a 'fucking disaster', but terrible nonetheless. Perhaps Amazon has a spanking in order?
Friday, October 24, 2003 2:30:26 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I searched for Xml Schema and the search returned 130 books which I would say half were even close to relevant subject. I then sort by publication date and it gets even worse.. What a shame!
Friday, October 24, 2003 8:03:42 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Did they change this already? I searched for "java xml" (without the quotes), and the top result was O'Reilly's "Java and XML", and all the rest of the top hits have both words in the title.
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