

Amazon's search is pretty darn impressive - brandnewlow
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Triumph+of+Roberto+Bola%F1o+Thursday%2C+December+18%2C+2008+11%3A00+AM+By+Sarah+Kerr+++++2666++by+Roberto+Bola%F1o%2C+translated+from+the+Spanish+by+Natasha+Wimmer+++++The+Romantic+Dogs++by+Roberto+Bola%F1o%2C+translated+from+the+Spanish+by+Laura+Healy+++++Well+beyond+his+sometimes+nomadic+life%2C+Roberto+Bola%F1o+was+an+exemplary+literary+rebel.+To+drag+fiction+toward+the+unknown+he+had+to+go+there+himself%2C+and+then+invent+a+method+with+which+to+represent+it.+Since+the+unknown+place+was+reality%2C+the+results+of+his+work+are+multi-dimensional%2C+in+a+way+that+runs+ahead+of+a+critic%27s+one-at-a-time+powers+of+description.+Highlight+Bola%F1o%27s+conceptual+play+and+you+risk+missing+the+sex+and+viscera+in+his+work.+Stress+his+ambition+and+his+many+references+and+you+conjure+up+threats+of+exclusive+high-modernist+obscurity%2C+or+literature+as+a+sterile+game%2C+when+the+truth+is+it%27s+hard+to+think+of+a+writer+who+is+less+of+a+snob%2C+or--in+the+double+sense+of+exposing+us+to+unsavory+things+and+carrying+seeds+for+the+future--less+sterile.&x=0&y=0

======
thorax
Much better than Amazon used to have, definitely.

Though I'm not so sure it's really as impressive as I first thought. It seems
to heavily weigh the beginning of the search text. Here's the same search you
used, but with the beginning part moved to the end:

<http://ri.ms/vl7>

We do a lot of this full-text search optimization at bug.gd-- we focus on
parts of the text that are the rarest in the corpus/index and provide a higher
weight to matches on those keywords (also factoring in phrase/proximity).

I thought Amazon was doing something similar, but the change in moving around
the words either means they have a maximum number of keywords they actually
pass to their engine, or they're using a bias towards words at the front of
the search (which is interesting itself).

------
kqr2
Here's google's answer as a comparison:

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22The+Triumph+of+R...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22The+Triumph+of+Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o+Thursday%2C+December+18%2C+2008+11%3A00+AM+By+Sarah+Kerr+2666+by+Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o%2C+translated+from+the+Spanish+by+Natasha+Wimmer+The+Romantic+Dogs+by+Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o%2C+translated+from+the+Spanish+by+Laura+Healy+Well+beyond+his+sometimes+nomadic+life%2C+Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o+was+an+exemplary+literary+rebel.+To+drag+fiction+toward+the+unknown+he+had+to+go+there+himself%2C+and+then+invent+a+method+with+which+to+represent+it.+Since+the+unknown+place+was+reality%2C+the+results+of+his+work+are+multi-
dimensional%2C+in+a+way+that+runs+ahead+of+a+critic%27s+one-at-a-
time+powers+of+description.+Highlight+Bola%C3%B1o%27s+conceptual+play+and+you+risk+missing+the+sex+and+viscera+in+his+work.+Stress+his+ambition+and+his+many+references+and+you+conjure+up+threats+of+exclusive+high-
modernist+obscurity%2C+or+literature+as+a+sterile+game%2C+when+the+truth+is+it%27s+hard+to+think+of+a+writer+who+is+less+of+a+snob%2C+or
--
in+the+double+sense+of+exposing+us+to+unsavory+things+and+carrying+seeds+for+the+future
--less+sterile.%22&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=)

~~~
brandnewlow
My implicit point, exactly.

I'm working on a memetracker system that will pull in related data on the fly
to spruce up the memes. Google proper's been all but useless to me. Youtube's
search api has actually been a great last-resort way to get related images.
Meanwhile Amazon looks like a pretty good tool too.

~~~
diN0bot
by using quotes you prevent google from not searching on the complete phrase.
this is a better comparison:

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+Triumph+of+Robe...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+Triumph+of+Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o+Thursday%2C+December+18%2C+2008+11%3A00+AM+By+Sarah+Kerr+2666+by+Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o%2C+translated+from+the+Spanish+by+Natasha+Wimmer+The+Romantic+Dogs+by+Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o%2C+translated+from+the+Spanish+by+Laura+Healy+Well+beyond+his+sometimes+nomadic+life%2C+Roberto+Bola%C3%B1o+was+an+exemplary+literary+rebel.+To+drag+fiction+toward+the+unknown+he+had+to+go+there+himself%2C+and+then+invent+a+method+with+which+to+represent+it.+Since+the+unknown+place+was+reality%2C+the+results+of+his+work+are+multi-
dimensional%2C+in+a+way+that+runs+ahead+of+a+critic%27s+one-at-a-
time+powers+of+description.+Highlight+Bola%C3%B1o%27s+conceptual+play+and+you+risk+missing+the+sex+and+viscera+in+his+work.+Stress+his+ambition+and+his+many+references+and+you+conjure+up+threats+of+exclusive+high-
modernist+obscurity%2C+or+literature+as+a+sterile+game%2C+when+the+truth+is+it%27s+hard+to+think+of+a+writer+who+is+less+of+a+snob%2C+or
--
in+the+double+sense+of+exposing+us+to+unsavory+things+and+carrying+seeds+for+the+future
--less+sterile.&btnG=Search)

~~~
tsally
" 'life' (and any subsequent words) was ignored because we limit queries to 32
words. "

That's not a very Googley thing to do...

------
snewe
Ok, how do they do that? Parse every word and pick the few that get the most
search hits individually? Or Mechanical Turk?

~~~
aston
I'm thinking it might start with their algorithm for finding improbable
phrases. They serve as a kind of a word-based fingerprint for a book and
probably make searching on over-specific queries like this one a lot easier.

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/search-inside/sipshelp.html>

