Problems with Searching Amazon

Op Ed — Opinions and Editorials

Random Ramblings — Problems with Searching Amazon: You Can’t Always Find What You Want

Column Editor: Bob Holley (Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University, 13303 Borgman Avenue, Huntington Woods, MI 48070-1005; Phone: 248-547-0306) <aa3805@wayne.edu>

I’ve been selling books on Amazon for eleven years and was sometimes confused by not finding items through a well formulated search but then serendipitously discovering them in some unexpected way. Only in February 2020 did I decide to investigate this issue more systematically. From a posting to an Amazon Forum, I learned that I wasn’t the only one who has encountered this problem. Earlier, at the 2020 ALA Midwinter, I talked to one acquisitions librarian who told me that this issue was common knowledge. I was unable, however, to find any confirmation in Library & Information Source or through Google searching though the lack of results may have been my failure to identify the correct search terms.

Not finding items that exist in the Amazon database due to searching “glitches” affects both librarians and booksellers everywhere. As buyers, librarians are looking to purchase needed items. As sellers, both librarians and booksellers wish to find Amazon records to list their items. Creating a new record is much more difficult than appending the seller’s copy to an existing record and further diminishes the usefulness of the database by adding a duplicate record.

Defining the Problem

The problem is not the result of a searching mis

take. The searching sequence was as follows: 1. I searched for the item using multiple search terms. 2. I didn’t find the item and put it aside. 3. I found the item later by trying another search strategy or through serendipity. 4. The record that I found included search terms that I used in step 1 so that I should have discovered it then. 5. Retrying the searching strategy in step 1 sometimes still does not retrieve the item so that changes in the database do not completely explain my success in step 3.

In other words, the problem is not a searching mistake on my part or problems with the record from misspelling or other errors in the database. To reiterate, I used terms in step 1 that should have worked because they matched data in the record that I ultimately found.

Different Ways to Search in Amazon.com and Searching Conventions

The most accessible way to search for an item is the search area in the Amazon retail screen. It is possible to search in “All Departments” or in specific areas such as other options. Amazon presents results first in the indicated department followed by matches in other departments and then by various combinations of the words used in multi-word searches. An “Advanced Search” tool is available for books that is similar to those in many library databases. This option offers eleven searchable fields of which the most important are Keywords, Author, Title, ISBN, Publisher, and Publication Date. A third search is available only to sellers. In “Amazon Central Seller,” the “Catalog” and “Inventory” options lead to a drop-down menu that includes the choice to search for existing records to which the sellers can add their copies. If the seller doesn’t find a match, another link leads to the form to “Create a new listing.”

Amazon provides the following document on “Using search terms effectively” at https://sellercentral. amazon.com/gp/help/help.html?itemID=G23501&language=en_US. Most of the rules would be familiar to librarians. One disconcerting rule, however, is You don’t need punctuation, such as: “;”, “:”, “-”.”. even though using quotations marks is the normal convention to search for exact multiword expressions. In practice, Amazon does apply this convention to searches. I routinely use quotation marks for precise searching. For example, “music for children folk songs” retrieves six items while music for children folk songs returns “over 1,000 results.” In a similar fashion, applying the rule “Use singular or plural, no need for both” is a bad idea since following this rule returns different and less accurate results. I fault Amazon for providing this incorrect information. Finally, Amazon provides a list of “Related articles” on the left of the search helps page, but they have little relevance for this column.

Using Creative Search Strategies

I have discovered two other creative strategies for finding items where the multiple search strategies in the section above retrieved no records. The first is using AddAll — Used and Out of Print Search at http://used. addall.com/. As of February 8, 2020, this meta-search engine queries twenty-two used book sites for matches, including Amazon.com and its foreign affiliates. At one point, the site claimed access to 40 million records, but this figure no longer appears on the main searching page. I use this site frequently to determine my next steps when I don’t find an Amazon.com record. I have “Books,” “CD & Vinyl,” “Movies and TV,” and many

been surprised at times to find a listing for a book on Amazon.com that my prior searching didn’t find. I would then click through to this record to add my listing to the Amazon database. For the searcher not interested in comparative prices, AddAll can be set to continued on page 38

search only Amazon for greater efficiency. One disadvantage is that AddAll won’t provide any results if an item in the Amazon database is unavailable for sale.

The second strategy is to search Google with the terms “Amazon” and my chosen search terms for the item. This is my least favored preference because evaluating the results takes more time since Google also provides close matches and results from the affiliated foreign Amazon sites and non-Amazon.com sources. On the other hand, I used this strategy successfully just today to find an item that the Amazon search strategies didn’t retrieve. Since Google’s specialization is searching, the company may take more care to provide accurate results than Amazon itself.

My query on the Amazon forums, to be discussed in more detail below, about issues with searching identified a third strategy that proved less successful. One seller suggested looking for American sellers on Amazon’s international sites and then using their entries to see if the item is available in the main American site. To implement this strategy, AddAll can be set only to search any or all the Amazon offerings in their Canadian, French, German, or the UK subsidiaries. Amazon also has sites in China and Japan for those interested in buying or selling such materials.

My Experiments

I immediately tried out the new searching options on a stack of books where my simple searching from the Amazon retail screen didn’t retrieve any records in the Amazon database. Since I did this before considering writing this column, I didn’t keep formal statistics, but I estimate that I found useable Amazon entries for over half of them. I later did the same with a second group of books and kept statistics that I’ll provide below. To give some context, I sell books on Amazon as a hobby and get most of them cheaply as remainders from rummage and church sales. At these prices, I scoop everything up and come home with some strange items including older materials, gray literature, foreign language books, pamphlets, and publicity/propaganda items from various organizations. Sometimes these strange items are somewhat valuable and can be listed for $50 or more. Some even sell at these prices.

For the second test, I had a sample size of 23 books, certainly more indicative than statistically valid. After having failed to find a record from using multiple strategies in the Amazon options, I searched first in AddAll set to search only Amazon.com and then Google with “Amazon” and search terms from the book. For both searches, I tried multiple search strategies before giving up. If I found the item on AddAll, I didn’t repeat with Google so that Google might have had a higher count if I had done both searches.

Overall, I was able to find a useable Amazon record for seven items (30.4%) on AddAll and six (26%) on Google for a combined success rate of thirteen (56.5%). The failure rate was 43.5%. I was thus able to add a significant number of books to my inventory that I would otherwise have put aside for original input. Remember too that buyers, including libraries, would not have found these items with an Amazon retail or advanced book search.

I learned a few other things. If the book had a distinctive cover, a Google image search was an effective way of visually finding items or double-checking negative results. I found several books on non-US Amazon sites, but they were not available on the US version. I couldn’t find a decent record for the book that was available as a bilingual edition when my copy was an English translation and for those cases where the ISBN led to the hard cover version when I wished to sell the paperback with the same ISBN.

Speculation on the Reasons for Amazon Search Failures

From having read hundreds if not thousands of answers to questions on the Amazon forums, I didn’t expect Amazon to give any explanation for these search glitches. Amazon is amazingly close lipped about how its system works or, more importantly, doesn’t work. Since Amazon monitors these forums, I assume that an Amazon employee read my question, plus I specifically asked for a staff member to provide an explanation. No one did.

What follows is my analysis of the various reasons proposed by responses on the Amazon forum. I then give my personal favored explanation. (My question and the answers can be found here: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/can-anyone-explain-searching-on-amazon-to-me/563168.) I have two initial comments. First, I would expect that Amazon wants to make it easy for buyers to find items available for purchase and for third party vendors to list them for sale. Some of the answers below, however, contradict this assumption. Second, the search problems could be temporary glitches from a momentary hardware or software failure; but I have some scant evidence that this isn’t the case. After finding items through non-traditional searches, I put some aside to scan the book covers to add to my individual listing. When completing this task a few weeks later, I had the same difficulties in finding these items to list them for sale. My sample, however, was quite small.

1. Amazon doesn’t include items when they are “currently

unavailable” for sale. This reason makes partial sense because related search results provided by Amazon normally include similar buying options. The buyers could, however, put unavailable items on their wish lists. On the other hand, Amazon should want sellers to find “currently unavailable” items if they will then make the item available. A related question, too complex to describe here, is the case where sellers cannot find items that they themselves have listed because they show up as “currently unavailable.” One comment indicates that Amazon knows about this problem and is trying to correct it.

2. The record is suppressed due to problems with the data.

While the search term is found in the record, other problems with the record lead to its being suppressed. This reason also makes partial sense if the problem affects only some search strategies but not others including those from outside sources like Google search and AddAll. This reason doesn’t appear valid if the record is good enough to support a buyer purchase. For potential sellers, Amazon might want to avoid dealing with additional copies listed for sale that could complicate data correction.

3. Search results are modified according to the searchers’

prior searching. Amazon tracks browsing history as can be seen by the section “Inspired by your browsing history” for users that have logged into their Amazon accounts. Amazon may also track searches of those not logged in by using cookies. I don’t, however, see any reason why Amazon wouldn’t want anyone not to find items that they wish to purchase. The same comment suggests that Amazon may use a seller’s searching history to punish sellers that it has caught violating its rules. continued on page 39

to ship to the customer. While, in my experience, Amazon focuses on customer satisfaction and often treats its third-party sellers poorly, I’m loathe to suggest maliciousness on its part.

4. Amazon wants to lengthen the search process so that Conclusion: What Does This All Mean?

buyers will be tempted to purchase additional items. To quote For most buyers and sellers, these search problems will one response, “distraction means bigger shopping carts and a not be very important. Current popular books of all types larger volume of sales.” I would, however, question a strategy will be easy to find, and Amazon will fix problems quickly that diverts buyers from an item that interests them in the hopes where significant revenue is at stake. It does matter for third that they will buy something else. One experiment for another party sellers like me and for libraries that are looking to sell day might be to test search results from the retail selling searching their materials on Amazon. Our goal is to list as many items options with those designed for sellers because Amazon has no as possible by using existing records since record creation reason to discourage sellers from listing additional items for sale. takes significantly more time. The multi-step search process 5. Amazon doesn’t care about the accuracy of its searches described earlier in this column may help both groups find but only cares about increasing sales. Another comment states “hidden” records as it did for me with my limited sample. that “what Amazon calls a search function is not a search funcSometimes these items may be listed at a good price because tion under any generally recognized use of the term. It is almost of their scarcity, but their odds of selling are also not high. entire(ly) a sale engine designed to direct you to whatever they As for the effect upon buyers, libraries may wish to purchase want to sell you with at least as high, or higher, profit margin specialized items, especially those not available through infor Amazon.” While Amazon has shown itself to be ruthlessly terlibrary loan. In this case, I would recommend, however, focused on increasing sales, I have trouble totally agreeing with using AddAll since the library is not limited to purchasing this statement. Creating distrust of its searching function will such items on Amazon. have a negative effect upon both buyers and sellers and perhaps The philosophical lesson for me was learning not to trust push them to look elsewhere where the search function provides large databases. I spent ten years believing that simple Amgreater accuracy. But I could be wrong since Amazon has a azon searches were accurate when they weren’t. We should treasure trove of data to examine and can take advantage of the all be aware of and humbled by the potential failures of our best artificial intelligence available to maximize sales and proft. access tools and employ multiple search strategies rather than My Hypothesis to Explain Amazon giving up too quickly.

Search Failures

My hypothesis is that the Amazon database is so large that mistakes are inevitable, that Amazon focuses on fixing problems affecting the largest number of products first, and that some of the reasons for searching glitches given above would not be worth Amazon’s time to correct. Correction Notice / Letter According to Scrapehero, “Amazon.com has a total of 119,928,851 products as of April 2019” and “the largest category in Dear Ms. April Hathcock, Amazon is Books (44.2M)” (https://www. I am deeply sorry and regret not citing your quote (April M. Hathcock, scrapehero.com/number-of-products-on“Learning Agency, Not Analytics,” At the Intersection, Jan. 24, 2018), in amazon-april-2019/). Given that the number the Against the Grain (ATG) article I wrote for the April 1, 2020 issue. It of individual items for sale for each entry was wrong and an insensitive mistake not to include your citation. I am can range from zero into the hundreds, the asking the editors of ATG to include the following corrections to the article: Amazon database is huge and must deal with ATG editors, please include (Hathcock, 2018) as an in-text citation to an enormous number of simultaneous transparagraph 13: actions in real time. Errors and temporary Inflammatory rhetoric ends Kyle Jones’ (2019) piece, Just Because outages are unavoidable. You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: Practitioner Perceptions of Learning

Two pieces of evidence lend support for Analytics Ethics where he quotes Hathcock (2018, para.4): my hypothesis. First, Amazon itself often In stark terms, April Hathcock argues that learning analytics ‘is a colotells its users that it is experiencing technical nialist, slave-owning, corporatizing, capitalist practice that enacts violence, difficulties and suggests trying again later. If yes violence, against the sanctity of a learner’s privacy, body and mind.’ (18) such stoppages occur while third party sellers are entering book records, errors in the record Please add this reference to the article: may hinder later retrieval. Similar glitches Hathcock, A. (2018, January 24). Learning agency, not analytics. At in processing search queries can negatively The Intersection. https://aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/learnaffect retrieval. Second, the Amazon forums, ing-agency-not-analytics/ which I read each day, include examples Sincerely, Kirsten Kinsley from sellers of multiple things that have gone wrong. I have encountered such problems, some of which have been difficult to detect Please Note: The article has been corrected at: https://against-thebut with serious consequences for my busigrain.com/2020/04/v321-one-academic-librarys-approach-to-the-learnness, such as not being able to find the book ing-analytics-backlash/. — Yr. Ed.