<story><title>Tell HN: Amazon&apos;s book search is gamed, keyword-stuffed, and inaccurate</title><text>In short: horrible.&lt;p&gt;I know this won&amp;#x27;t be new to most of you, but I wanted to share an anecdote (and a rant!)&lt;p&gt;I have a friend who has brain cancer. I went to Amazon searching for books on the subject and I typed ‘brain cancer’ in the search (books) field. What did I find?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Amazon UK&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;As you scroll down page 1 of the search results, you find examples of “brain cancer notebook” or “brain cancer journal”. Empty notebooks with nothing to do with the subject.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Amazon US&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Same search term. The search results were even worse. The “no content” ranked even higher on the first page of search page.&lt;p&gt;Here is a screenshot of the search results for Amazon UK and US: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.postimg.cc&amp;#x2F;JRDkSGRK&amp;#x2F;amazon-book-search.jpg&lt;p&gt;Try an Amazon book search for “Ukraine war” on Amazon UK and US and already the search results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks seizing the opportunity to profit from war (these blank notebooks are not donating to charities, they are simply seizing on keyword searches).&lt;p&gt;The reason so many of these &amp;quot;no content&amp;quot; notebooks pollute the books category is because of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service: a print-on-demand service. It has opened the flood gates to “low content” or “no content” journals and notebooks which allows &amp;quot;creators&amp;quot; publish hundreds of notebook titles. These are simply empty, lined or blank print-on-demand notebooks. Amazon includes these in book search results rather than confine these items to it’s own search category. You can find hundreds of YouTube videos on how to publish “no content” notebooks via KDP and how to game Amazon search results to rank higher.&lt;p&gt;I know Amazon simply doesn’t care, but I had to rant. I might be overreacting by the results I saw and I won’t be offended if you say so :-)</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg5</author><text>On a similar note, I&amp;#x27;ve found so many items on Amazon are &amp;quot;review hijacked&amp;quot;. You&amp;#x27;ll see 5 star reviews, but when you look at the actual reviews, they are all for a different product. They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product.&lt;p&gt;This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It&amp;#x27;s ridiculous that Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t catch this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ziml77</author><text>Even legit companies abuse that. Dymo&amp;#x27;s latest label printer models enforce DRM on the paper which is a shitty move on its own. But then what they did on Amazon was swap their model 450 printer to the new model 550 so they would keep all of the good reviews: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=hwggIw2HQuQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=hwggIw2HQuQ&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: Amazon&apos;s book search is gamed, keyword-stuffed, and inaccurate</title><text>In short: horrible.&lt;p&gt;I know this won&amp;#x27;t be new to most of you, but I wanted to share an anecdote (and a rant!)&lt;p&gt;I have a friend who has brain cancer. I went to Amazon searching for books on the subject and I typed ‘brain cancer’ in the search (books) field. What did I find?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Amazon UK&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;As you scroll down page 1 of the search results, you find examples of “brain cancer notebook” or “brain cancer journal”. Empty notebooks with nothing to do with the subject.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Amazon US&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Same search term. The search results were even worse. The “no content” ranked even higher on the first page of search page.&lt;p&gt;Here is a screenshot of the search results for Amazon UK and US: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.postimg.cc&amp;#x2F;JRDkSGRK&amp;#x2F;amazon-book-search.jpg&lt;p&gt;Try an Amazon book search for “Ukraine war” on Amazon UK and US and already the search results are populated with “Ukraine war” blank notebooks seizing the opportunity to profit from war (these blank notebooks are not donating to charities, they are simply seizing on keyword searches).&lt;p&gt;The reason so many of these &amp;quot;no content&amp;quot; notebooks pollute the books category is because of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service: a print-on-demand service. It has opened the flood gates to “low content” or “no content” journals and notebooks which allows &amp;quot;creators&amp;quot; publish hundreds of notebook titles. These are simply empty, lined or blank print-on-demand notebooks. Amazon includes these in book search results rather than confine these items to it’s own search category. You can find hundreds of YouTube videos on how to publish “no content” notebooks via KDP and how to game Amazon search results to rank higher.&lt;p&gt;I know Amazon simply doesn’t care, but I had to rant. I might be overreacting by the results I saw and I won’t be offended if you say so :-)</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg5</author><text>On a similar note, I&amp;#x27;ve found so many items on Amazon are &amp;quot;review hijacked&amp;quot;. You&amp;#x27;ll see 5 star reviews, but when you look at the actual reviews, they are all for a different product. They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product.&lt;p&gt;This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It&amp;#x27;s ridiculous that Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t catch this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chucksta</author><text>I went out of my way once to contact support for this, there is no way to report it directly and  got a very strong sense that they intentionally don&amp;#x27;t care</text></comment>