What Happened to Amazon Book Search?

By Barry Ritholtz - April 6th, 2010, 5:30PM

Does anyone know what happened to the very helpful and effective Amazon Book Search?

Its now gone missing from the main pages.

For keywords, I used to take advantage of the Amazon.com site as a fast and easy research tool. Want to know what books Paul Volcker is in? Care to see where a certain piece of legislation — say, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 — has been analyzed, discussed, debated?

Amazon.con was great for that — they had a huge run of books spidered for search.

Now, the Volcker search brings up only books he coauthored — but the CFMA search still works.

The substitute is now Google Books — but they have a are far less updated and extensive database — so far — than Amazon.com did.

See also
Amazon Debuts New Book Search Tool Gary Price, Search Engine Watch, Oct 27, 2003
http://searchenginewatch.com/3098831

Google Books
http://books.google.com/books

PERMALINK
Category: Web/Tech.

Comments

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

4 Responses to “What Happened to Amazon Book Search?”

dr_w Says:
April 2nd, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Just tried it and they are back! 1:02 PM PST on April 2.
Barry Ritholtz Says:
April 6th, 2010 at 9:26 pm
nope — still only provides minor answers

Not the full run it used to be !
Mike in Nola Says:
April 6th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
Barry, can’t say as I ever used it as IE7 and 8 have a lot of search engine options, including Amazon, so I’d do it the lazy way and then drill down.

I don’t know if the picture you have in your post is what you are looking for or what the replacement looks like. I did find that here:

http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Search-Books/b/ref=sv_b_0?ie=UTF8&node=241582011

I imagine that the link may be personalized for my particular visit, so you might have to modify it a bit.
Greg0658 Says:
April 8th, 2010 at 4:20 am
This is a post over at HuffPo. Maybe this is an answer.
As a side note .. I’ve been wondering how who is scanning the books and for how much. A person at our public library always has a pile of books going in/out .. wondering but never ask .. cause .. maybe I just don’t wanna get involved. Big time reader.

It’s About Search, Stupid
by Devereux Chatillon – Partner, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP
Posted: April 7, 2010 06:39PM BIO

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/devereux-chatillon/its-about-search-stupid_b_529383.html