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Tell HN: Amazon's book search is gamed, keyword-stuffed, and inaccurate

146 points by vanilla-almond ↗ HN
In short: horrible.

I know this won't be new to most of you, but I wanted to share an anecdote (and a rant!)

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?

Amazon UK

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.

Amazon US

Same search term. The search results were even worse. The “no content” ranked even higher on the first page of search page.

Here is a screenshot of the search results for Amazon UK and US: https://i.postimg.cc/JRDkSGRK/amazon-book-search.jpg

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).

The reason so many of these "no content" 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 "creators" 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.

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 :-)

104 comments

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Bostonian
Best wishes to your friend.

I have noticed Amazon's poor book search results too. If you search "fortran" in books you see some irrelevant content (the biography "When Fortran was Queen" is not what people are looking for) on the first page of 24 books, and the quality falls after that.

There would be probably be volunteers who could curate common Amazon book searches in their area of interest. I think this would help Amazon's sales, because I doubt that many people buy the dumb notebooks mentioned.

wenc
Just did a search for Fortran. Seems right to me.

Can you link to your search?

JaimeThompson
Amazon makes a lot of money selling ads these days so it might not be in their best interest, short term, to make search actually be better.
ranieuwe
s/book// and you are still pretty accurate.
brudgers
Amazon sells ads.

The overhead for ad inventory is lower than for physical goods.

The margins are higher as well.

fxtentacle
Amazon is the new ebay.

I still remember the good old times when ebay was mostly honest regular people selling used stuff online. Then "powersellers" appeared. Then things get automated. By now, e-bay is mostly new items but with horrible service and almost no safety checks.

That's also why GPU scalpers love both ebay and Amazon Marketplace.

bovermyer
I dunno, I'm still able to find good deals on used books and games on eBay.
Wingman4l7
The used folks definitely still exist, you just have to be judicious with your search filters, unfortunately.
JaimeThompson
>with horrible service and almost no safety checks

So e-bay was crypto before crypto.

kleer001
technically cryptocurriencies have no service and no safety checks, and that's the selling point
RajT88
You have to use the advanced search to find those folks now.

When I am looking for good deals on used stuff, I focus on lots of items, sorted by most recently listed. Always buy-it-now.

na85
>That's also why GPU scalpers love both ebay and Amazon Marketplace.

Maybe in 2030 I'll be able to buy an RX 6800 XT for MSRP.

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deanCommie
The key difference between Amazon and eBay is the amount of risk to the consumer.

There is NONE with Amazon.

There is zero chance that you will lose your money if you get scammed by someone into a bad product.

Everything else that people complain about is a function of selection vs curation: the more selection Amazon adds the more likely there is to be low-quality junk. I'm sure if they aggressively curated stuff, we'd see HackerNews stories get 1000 upvotes with headlines like "Amazon won't list my startup's products!" and people will be screaming about how it's not Amazon's job to censor or to curate, they should just be the "Everything Store", and let intelligent consumers like us decide.

lotsofpulp
No one is asking Amazon to curate. Just a simple filter option to only show stuff sourced by Amazon itself (which they removed years ago), that is NOT commingled with other random sellers’ junk, would be sufficient.

In other words, do the job that a retailer should be doing.

Of course, Amazon does not want to be a low profit margin retailer, which is fine, but then it also deserves to be called a more expensive Aliexpress.

everforward
My impression as an outsider was that eBay is pretty close on that front if you pay with PayPal.

From what I've heard, PayPal aggressively sides with the buyer, to the point where there are all kinds of scams you can run as a buyer.

Also, the risk isn't zero. https://www.newsweek.com/man-buys-7000-camera-amazon-receive... There are others, but that's the one that stuck in my head.

> Everything else that people complain about is a function of selection vs curation: the more selection Amazon adds the more likely there is to be low-quality junk. I'm sure if they aggressively curated stuff, we'd see HackerNews stories get 1000 upvotes with headlines like "Amazon won't list my startup's products!" and people will be screaming about how it's not Amazon's job to censor or to curate, they should just be the "Everything Store", and let intelligent consumers like us decide.

This is an over-simplification of the issue. I don't mind that Amazon sells crappy products; I buy some of the crappy products because I only need them to work once or for a week.

What I do mind is their total lack of competence in stopping people from passing off shitty products as good ones. I don't even know where to start the complaints on that. Inventory comingling resulting in people getting fake products or even empty boxes. Recycling ASIN's resulting in a shitty product inheriting a good product's reviews, or even inheriting reviews from an entirely unrelated product. Allowing user reviews, and then doing such a poor job of policing them that they're actively unhelpful due to gaming them.

They're basically digitized Walmart, except they allow people to use their brand to pretend their cheap crap isn't cheap crap.

I'm at the point where I only buy from Amazon if I'm intending to buy cheap junk, because I don't feel like dealing with the hassle of figuring out which items are dropshipped at a 10x markup and which are legitimately worthwhile.

buildbot
Nope, I lost 2.5K due to an empty box being shipped to me, and then amazon denying the return and lying during the subsequent chargeback.
PaulKeeble
I thought I understood how to interact with ebay and use reviews and history to avoid the scammers until I run across one in January. They know just how to avoid ebay issuing refunds and then even worse is that ebay didn't even keep the negative review. The reviews on ebay are fake, they are at least sanitized and the negative reviews removed because I saw it happen and I wasn't informed.

Everyone gets scammed on ebay and its also true of Amazon, you will get sold fake products on there and the search is getting worse and worse very quickly.

ufo
Even without the obvious scams like the empty notebooks, searching for books about a specific disease is a gamble. The majority are crap from snake oil salesmen, promising miracle cures or "10 truths your doctor doesn't want you to know".
8note
Having recently used amazon search to find a book by name, it seems to work well enough; the book came up as the first result

I think it's a search tool and not a browse/explore tool. You should already know which thing you want by the time you ask amazon to find it for you

blue1
My recent experience is that some books are unfindable by search, even if you enter the exact title. Only ISBN works. In other words, amazon search totally sucks. To the point that I find easier to search amazon via google ("now you have another problem").
null_object
> I think it's a search tool and not a browse/explore tool. You should already know which thing you want by the time you ask amazon to find it for you

I was recently searching Amazon for a specific classic Kindle book with the exact title, author and publisher (Penguin Classics) and still got a list of maybe 500 completely garbage versions that had obviously gamed the algorithm.

Even finally finding the “correct” version in the list, and clicking on that led me to a fake version of the book.

buescher
I've had exactly that problem and had to resort to searching other booksellers for the Penguin edition of something in the public domain.
PaulDavisThe1st
Before Amazon was Amazon, I had described to Jeff my own vision for the browse/explore "tool", which would have been based on US Library of Congress classifications (remember, not-yet-Amazon was only a US company at that point). You would have been able to "dial in/out" on progressively finer and coarser categorization, and switch to "adjacent" LoC classifications.

Sadly, the source of the company's bibliographic data at the time flattened the LoC 3-level heirarchy in a way that made it impossible (or at least very difficult) to recover, and I had to abandon the idea. I still think it would have been lovely.

ryanchants
I was thinking about building something like this recently. Mostly to replicate the library browsing method online. How it works when I go to the library: I have a book I'm interested in. I look that book up and get its call number. I then go to where the book is on the shelf. I browse its neighbors and uncover books I never would have known to look up.
pg5
On a similar note, I've found so many items on Amazon are "review hijacked". You'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.

This was the case for the front page results for S22 screen protectors when I was looking a few weeks ago. It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.

chucksta
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't care
Chirael
That is the best indicator of a monopoly that I can see; you see it with utility and cable companies as well, basically they are not worried at all that the customer will go somewhere else because there really is very little competition
wojciii
I just stopped buying Chinese crap from Amazon - this happened after they had issues with my credit card and of course I had to pay to fix it. This happended 6 months ago and I have been happier since.

My main problem is that there are no alternatives to buying ebooks. In terms of how easy it's to buy and transfer to the device.

soco
I don't even remember the last time I bought from Amazon (or eBay for that matter). It's simply not worth the hassle. At this point even Wish is more trustworthy, so I see no reason to still buy from those - if you need cheap (and often bad) stuff you can get it directly from the source, and otherwise, welcome to the rest of the world of online shopping.
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dazc
Book reviews have become useless too since they are mostly all gushing 4 or 5 star reviews that, oddly, all seem to be composed by professional writers.
ShortStretto
This might not be comparible but on webfiction platforms review swaps are so common that reviews should not be trusted in any form anymore honestly. "I'll review your stuff if you review mine"
krinchan
Aren’t the book reviews just farmed from Goodreads and splatted onto the book’s store page? Goodreads is kinda trash with all the “ARC provided by SomeWebsite.com” reviews. I’ve noticed that a ton of ARC reviews tend to be by people who don’t even care about the genre the book is in. This is especially true of Sci-Fi. Almost every ARC review for sci-fi books on Goodreads boils down to “I hate sci-fi but this book was free so I tried to read it and I still hate sci-fi.”
GCA10
Or pseudo-writers who get paid a pittance for stringing the same short, flattering phrases together, again and again. With a little practice, it gets easy to spot the repetitive cadence of the shills.
notacoward
Often it's the author themselves using sock-puppet accounts. One of my claims to semi-fame is that I was one of the first to identify a particularly now-notorious YA author as a barely-literate review cheat. (I won't name him because he has spent almost twenty years since then trying to retaliate e.g. with fake legal threats and doxxing combined with some libel of his own, and I'm not interested in fighting another round when his frequent searches for his own name lead him here.) There's at least one Hall of Shame I know of for authors caught doing this, and it has many entries.

For books and many other things you have to simply ignore five-star reviews because the few that aren't fake are kind of clueless ("product arrived quickly"). Often you need to ignore one-star reviews as well because they're packed by competitors and people who couldn't read the directions. There's far more actual information to be found in the middle/mixed ratings.

boznz
Yes this is annoying, I ignore all 5 and 1 star ratings
ziml77
Even legit companies abuse that. Dymo'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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwggIw2HQuQ
robbedpeter
I would say that definitively puts Dymo in the "not legit" camp. They're shady af.
LegitShady
The issue isn't dyno (although it is their actions that obviously started it) it's that amazon does nothing to protect their customers from companies like dymo.
ckmar
I made a platform[0] to support natural "word of mouth" recommendations - where you can discover what your trusted family and friends recommend.

It's called unfluence to connotate the inversion of influence from social media ad networks, to individuals.

[0] https://unfluence.app

dspillett
> They sold some simple product with good reviews, then swapped everything out for their new, more expensive product.

It isn't always the same "they", in fact I'd guess it isn't more often than not.

Sometimes a seller is shutting shop, and to make that last few pennies one of the assets they pass on is the account with products with good reviews. Another route to the same effect is apparently inactive accounts getting hacked. Maybe even active accounts, with the sterling reputation Amazon has for support it might be more hassle than it is worth for the hacked seller to do anything about it.

> It's ridiculous that Amazon doesn't catch this.

This comes under “sterling reputation Amazon has for support” when it comes to it being reported. And they have little incentive to deal with it if it isn't reported until there is a competitor that does it better and takes enough business for them to care – the inflated reviews improve sales of which they get a cut.

ComputerGuru
This is actually a very complicated topic. Amazon will let sellers of product X “claim” a product page of a (now) poorly performing product Y, or will themselves substitute product Y for product X (swap the listings but keep the ASIN).

It’s not even for remotely equivalent products: my subscribe and save for cat litter was replaced with a birth control test under the same ASIN, after being unavailable for a few months!

LegitShady
its not complicated - its quite simply dishonest. i guess its complicated whether it counts as fraud or not but if someone trusts amazon reviews in 2022 theyre not making good decisions anyways. heavily gamed, paid for, etc.

i bought a wifi card on amazon and it came with a note mentioning a $20 amazon gift card if left them a good review. i reported it to amazon and nothing happened - i dont think they even responded.

i go elsewhere for reviews because amazons are so gamed and untrustworthy.

ComputerGuru
I meant the mechanics involved are complicated and not as simple as "seller Foo manually swaps out the listing details of product X for product Y."

But yes, you're right. The short and sweet of it is that it's just a gamble getting anything you can't physically validate or verify upon receipt off of Amazon.

Nextgrid
Everything will be gamed as long as there are no penalties for doing so.
meetups323
Everything will be gamed. Penalties are part of the game.
Nextgrid
Well the idea is that penalties should be high enough to not only offset any gains you'd get from breaking the rules but leave you in a worse position to deter breaking the rules to begin with.
elcapitan
I noticed on German Amazon that book search got inexplicably bad recently. Like as if they swapped out their algorithms for some trivial matching query. Now I can only find books by typing the exact title. Before that, I used Amazon to explore current books even as a replacement for the library catalog because the results were much better.
unmole
Thankfully, Amazon India seems to be free from this so far.

Searching for brain cancer returns a self-help book for dealing with cancer, academic publications for cancer diagnosis and a memoir of a brain cancer survivor.

I was always puzzled by the negative experiences that I usually see in HN because I have literally never had a bad experience with Amazon. Sure, a few shipments I received were damaged but they were promptly replaced with minimal hassle. I guess the difference is Amazon is still trying to capture market share in India while it's already established itself as a Behemoth in the US.

bombcar
I'm wondering - did you search Amazon India for "brain cancer" in English? What happens if you search the same term in Hindi?

It could also be that there's no point in the notebook scalpers "publishing" in India because the amount "made" is so low. But a few sales in the USA could be worth it.

unmole
> I'm wondering - did you search Amazon India for "brain cancer" in English?

Yes.

> What happens if you search the same term in Hindi?

No results specifically about brain cancer, but books about the brain and books about cancer. Some of them are selling quack cures for cancer, which while concerning is nothing like what OP described

sundarurfriend
I agree with the last paragraph (also Indian, also get similar results btw). I don't have the experience of Amazon having a lot of scummy/scammy products, and the reviews for the products I've purchased have generally matched my own experience.

> I guess the difference is Amazon is still trying to capture market share in India while it's already established itself as a Behemoth in the US.

Yeah, and I think that affects this (positively) in two ways: (i) Amazon cares more about being seen as a legitimate player and not looking worse than the competition at this stage, (ii) it takes time for the scammers to find the best ways to game the platform, and they're still figuring it out.

buescher
On a related note, Amazon's recommendation engine was terrifyingly excellent in 1999-2000 or so, to the point I was probably spending more on books than I should have been at the time. It has been on a long downhill trend since some point after that, around 2000 or 2001, when it started insistently recommending me the current Harry Potter bestseller instead of things I was actually interested in.
HarryHirsch
One of the standard textbooks on invertebrates is Giribet's Invertebrate Tree of Life. You order that book from Amazon and get spammed with bad Kabbalah books. How does that happen, even, someone interested in hardcore zoology would be the last person to buy something about plastic religiosity. The current state of affairs is not just bad, it's infuriating, and it used to be much better!
bombcar
"Tree of Life" is obviously what it is going off of, as that's a term outside of invertebrates. Clearly whatever "artificial stupidity" they have running doesn't really care about matching that well.

I bet https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tree+of+life&i=stripbooks is basically what you get.

PaulKeeble
Same, their recommendation engine was incredible and it helped me find so many books I loved. I don't bother with the recommendations today its full of garbage. I have really noticed how bad the search has become in the past 6 months as well, its very hard to find what you are looking for on Amazon, many products listed don't contain the keywords you listed at all.
RajT88
The problem exists in some form all over Amazon.

Try searching for a free public domain kindle ebook. You will have to scroll through pages of paid "special editions" which the "authors" have made no real changes to before you can find the free public domain copies.

randcraw
Exactly. For years now, I find stuff at Amazon by LEAVING the Amazon site and then searching Google for "OBJECTNAME Amazon". That circumvents most of Amazon's filters, revealing many more products like out-of-print versions of books that Amazon wants to hide or deprecate.
throwawayboise
Yeah Amazon is worthless to me for the last few years. The reviews are fake, the search is terrible, and many of the products are counterfeit or resold/returned items. When I realized that I canceled my prime subscription and now when I search for products I explicitly exclude any results from amazon.* domains.
tuetuopay
This is a trainwreck. I just tested on Amazon France.

Typing "brain cancer" (in plain english) yielded the same thing as your screenshot, expect there was an actual book about overcoming the chemo once cured.

Typing "cancer du cerveau" (en français dans le texte, literal translation of brain cancer) is even more a dumpster fire than what you describe, it's appalling... Here are the results in actual order:

  1. A notebook, same as yours
  2. An actual book (yay!) about breast cancer (how?!?)
  3. A Yuka guide book about healthy food
  4. A book about "the new happiness formula", positive thinking etc...
  5. 50 habits of successful people, how to automate your career (now I'm confused)
  6. Healthy eating shit
  7. Confidence boost guide
  8. Story of a cop that had blood cancer
  9. Digestive system guide
  10. Anxiety and stress guide
  11. Miracles of taking a cold shower against procrastination (you're just messing with me, right?)
  12. Alt-medicine crap
  13. Positive thinking book
  14. Biohacking neuroscience to combat distraction (I swear I'm not making this up)
  15. Anticancer (actual title)
What can I say... At least I got mostly books in the books section?
leephillips
Could at least a few of these be the results for “brain” or “cancer” as separate terms? Does Amazon have phrase searching, so you can actually search for “brain cancer”?
jrockway
Amazon's keyword search is quite broken, and vendors exploit that. I have an HN comment somewhere where I was talking about an experiment I did; I took some of the descriptions that exploit keyword matching, and asked GPT-3 my actual question. I think the specific example was waterproof LED strips. I noticed that many LED strips had the description "not waterproof" somewhere in the product name. If you search Amazon for "waterproof LED strip" (which BTW, I don't think is an actual thing), it returns all of the self-declared "non-waterproof" items, which is the exploit. I set up a GPT-3 completion where I asked questions like "is an Amazon item with the description 'foobar 12V LED light strip non-waterproof' waterproof?" For everthing I tested, GPT-3 returned completions like "No, of course it's not waterproof." If Amazon used ML like this to return search results, it would be slightly harder for vendors to exploit, and search would be much better. (But of course, sometimes it would return nothing when the user would have been happy with a non-waterproof LED light strip. I think that's a good thing, their Revenue Department probably disagrees though. If someone who wants waterproof lights gets one that's not waterproof and doesn't return it after paying their credit card bill, then "the system works".)
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kabdib
I just searched for some works by authors I like (some well known, some pretty obscure). Amazon's search results seem better than they were a year ago, when I last tried this; back then it seemed like the results were half promotional garbage.

It might be better now. It's still not great, and I still use search on Amazon's site with reluctance and mistrust.

wrthfl
I'm using bookfinder for exactly this reason...
deanCommie
This is 100% a function of selection and the number of available eyes for bad actors to try to game. Rampant unstoppable capitalism and all that.

Amazon.ca does not have this problem - search "brain cancer" under books and you get

1. BRAIN CANCER: Step By Step Guide On Everything You Need To Know About Brain Cancer Causes, Signs, Symptoms And Treatment

2. Fuck Brain Cancer : 2021 Planner: Schedule Organizer / Weekly Calendar

3. Glioblastoma - A guide for patients and loved ones: Your guide to glioblastoma and anaplastic astrocytoma brain tumours

impostervt
I publish books on KDP. Not low/no content, though.

I really wish amazon would charge $5/month/book you put up on KDP. It would eliminate a TON of garbage, and any half decent book would more than make up the $5/month to pay for itself.