So, nobody cares?

Who uses “Advanced Search?” & Why?

Book Search hasn’t worked for Years…You need much more than a title and author for a book NOT on AZ Best Seller List…

Change your deliver address. enter a zip code such as 20012 then you might find something different. The Amazon algorithm will show you different search results based on your location.

Dealing mostly with textbooks, I almost always search by ISBN. But sometimes even that can lead to dead ends, which is surprising when the ISBN is right there in the listing’s product details. The other day I input an ISBN-10 (which for most textbook pages is identical to the actual ASIN) in the main search bar on the Amazon landing page, with ALL DEPARTMENTS (or whatever it is called) as the category. No results. This is the ASIN I input! I had to change the search category to BOOKS to get a result. Seriously?

And as of the last couple weeks or so, the main Amazon landing page search (haven’t tried the others like advanced search) won’t work with hyphens in the ISBN when it used to work just fine and would essentially ignore the hyphens. Who decided that was a good move? Do they not test these things out on real users before going live? Why make things harder to find and/or more difficult for the buyer? Ugh.

Or you have the bookjacker types who’ve lately ramped up in creating hundreds or thousands of duplicate product pages. They’re putting the ISBNs in the title, which often makes those product pages appear before the legitimate product pages in search results. Ugh.

As far as searching by keywords (title, author, etc.), I’ve always found Amazon’s search engine to be pretty abysmal. I’ll even use quotes and Boolean operators and such, and the results are still ho-hum. It’s like when the bay changed their search engine several years ago (including no longer accepting the * wildcard!), and I thought to myself, “Why, WHY would a site that relies on people finding things through a search make things more difficult to find?”

I know, people will say the search engine is a marketing tool. But still, the venues should give at least some of us searchers some credit and trust we know what we’re looking for. If I’m looking specifically for book XYZ, I’m not going to be satisfied with and/or buy books ABC and DEF that come up in the search. I only want XYZ. Sigh.

It has been down for a while…

Search bar still works.

I am right now talking with Amazon about this, and the customer service rep simply cannot get his head around that I am not interested in a particular book, but in how the page is not working. Like battering my head against a wall. Asking if I am talking about a physical or kindle book. Saints preserve us.

Try searching for the title, in quotation marks, via the Seller mobile app. You can then click the “Sell” tag icon for a desired result and then expand the Product Details box to reveal the specific ASIN.

Unlike the regular (non-advanced, and functionally forever crappy) search bar on Amazon.com in a standard browser window, a search using Seller app, with the terms in quotation marks, usually returns the specific exact-phrase results you’re looking for.

It may be cold comfort (I agree that Advanced Search is indispensable, especially for finding the ASIN of non-isbn or isbn-not-specified books), but it’s still useful as a temporary workaround.

Down for me too. And, yes, I use it regularly. I use it often to compare different editions.

Advanced book search hasn’t worked for at least a couple of days and my orders have tanked.

Sometimes I think Advanced Search should be called Advanced Cell Phone Case Search. When I am looking for a Kipling book and use the author result- no books but a plethora of cell phone cases.