» Tuesday, 1 January A.D. 2008

why we choose amazon

Tricia and I received a Barnes and Noble gift card for Christmas; the other day my parents gave us the opportunity to spend it by watching the girls for us while we went out on a “date”. I put “date” in quotes because about the only time we spent together was riding in the car before we arrived at the bookstore and driving home afterwards. We have wildly different things we're looking for at the bookstore, and that's OK.

Anyway, when we went to check out, my wife forestalled the sales clerk by saying “No we're not Barnes and Noble premium members,” or whatever the service happens to be called. The sales clerk slyly noted that we had forgotten about the second half of the question--“Would you like to sign up?” Tricia said no, we do all our shopping on Amazon, thank-you-very-much, but we just happened to have this gift certificate, so here we are. And we appreciate the free shipping.

The sales clerk asked around and informed us that barnes and Noble had free shipping similar to Amazon's. We were duly enlightened. He also informed us that our gift ceritificate can be redeemed on the website as well.

I feel a little silly (rude?) informing the sales clerks and brick-and-mortar bookstores that we really do all ourr shopping at Amazon and we're only there because of specific incentives...but it's true. Nowadays, I treat going to physical bookstores as opportunities to see books that I might not have found through Amazon--there's something satisfying about being able to browse the stacks of books to find titles--and then I write down interesting titles and authors for buying on Amazon or checking out from the library.

However, I thought I might be able to order some books through the website to finish off our gift certificate, so I went to their website and typed in “history philosophy”, hoping that would turn up books from Frederick Copleston's nine-volume series. (I didn't remember the author's name when I first started this search.) The first such book was result #27. Books prior to #27 that Barnes and Noble helpfully thought were more relevant to my query included:

Notice that none of those books have “history” or “philosophy” in their titles. Hofstader's book almost gets a pass for being thematically apropos, but the other two are way off the mark.

I headed to Amazon and typed in “history philosophy” and one of Mr. Copleston's books turned up as the first result.

Hey, Barnes and Noble, the search engine for your website is garbage.

(In fairness, I should note that Amazon's search is not perfect, either; two of the first fifteen results for my above query and a New Living Translation Bible and a documentary on the Shroud of Turin (History's Mysteries). But at least the other thirteen results have both “history” and “philosophy” in their titles or are thematically apropos--Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, for instance.)

posted by Nate @ 12:01AM