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It does not search within book texts, and thus it does not return vast numbers of confusing false hits. Notes on Searching AmazonThe Search Box that is what this page is all about is simple and intuitive enough that you should be able to use it with no explanations at all. But there are all sorts of little things to know that can make your search experience more powerful and less prone to mistakes, so you really should carefully read the material here at least once before actually using the Search Box. This information is mostly about the way Amazon handles searches--not about any quirks of the software we use to query Amazon from your entries here and display the data Amazon sends back--so most of it will be helpful to you whether you're using this page or sometime just searching Amazon's own site directly. The "Search Box" below has two areas: required "search for" data and optional "how to search" data. The "Required" DataIn the "required" area, you must enter something in at least one of the entry areas--Author, Title, Publisher, Subject, Keywords, or ISBN; you may enter data in several or all of them if you like, but there must be something somewhere. (Case does not matter.) Note that if you specify an ISBN--because it uniquely identifies a particular edition--all other entries and option settings will be ignored on an ISBN search. Generally, if you have exact data, such as part or all of the author's name or the title, you are better off not using the "Subject" or "Keywords" criteria: save those for wide-ranging searches for categories of books. Author-Name "Gotchas"Beware this: Amazon attempts to maximize hits, and thus interprets names liberally: so, if you search for, say, just author Jack Vance, you will get back in your results a wild-game cookbook by a woman named J. Carol Vance. While you can eliminate such "ringers" by using the Exact-name option, you then risk missing books that really are by Jack Vance should Amazon list any such Vance books by some variant of his name, such as "J. Vance' or "John Vance". You can reduce false-hit problems, at least when searching for particular books, by using the author's last name only (using the Start of last name option below the name text-entry area). But you then have to beware this major defect in Amazon's database: authors whose last name is more than one word will often not produce the results you would expect. Here is an example: There are (or at one time were) 10 editions of books by Ursula K. Le Guin with the word "wind" in their titles available new from Amazon. Doing searches with "wind" as the only title text (and the Title word(s) option checked), searches using variations of the author's name and of author-name options selected gave these results:
(The success of the search with the last name run together--"Leguin"--is not universal: it just happened to work in this instance. Trying the same trick with Henrik Willem Van Loon as Vanloon, for example, does not work.) The following rule appears, from our tests, to be reliable: when using only an author's last name in a search, put a comma after the name (and, of course, select the Start of last name option). You don't need the comma if the name is the usual single word, but always using the comma is a good habit to cultivate. Title "Gotchas"Because titles are as prone to erronous entry in Amazon's database as author names, you should at the least restrict your title-data entries to nontrivial words in the title: for example, to look for The Palace of Love, just enter "palace love" as title words. Warning: Titles beginning with any one of the words And, Or, or Not will likely return false results. (That is because Amazon's query-parsing algorithm may, depending on the exact structure of the search request, interpret those words as logic commands affecting the way the search terms are combined, rather than as parts of the title proper.) So, for reliability, never include one of those words as the first word of a title--just omit it, being sure you have selected the Title word(s) option. A Useful Rule
The "Optional" Settings"Sort Results by"This controls just what you think it does. If your search is for a particular book, the default setting of Price (Low to High) is usually the most useful; if your search is likely to produce more than one title (as with, for example, a search just by author name), then Alphabetical (A-Z) is probably best. The other options are pretty much self-explanatory except Bestselling and Featured Items, whose exact significance to Amazon we don't know for certain (try them and see). "Show unavailable items as well?"The default setting (unchecked = No) will cause the results presented to you to omit all books for which the "Availability" listed by Amazon is or includes any of:
If you click a check in this Options box, all found titles will be presented, including those described above. Note! Because "Availability" information takes Amazon's servers a relatively long time to get, Amazon will sometimes--if those "availability" data are slow in arriving--ship out response pages without those data, which will show up on what you see as --availability not specified--, but will also will have the effect of including any edition so tagged in the lists, even if it "really" is unavailable, because the filter cannot exclude as Unavailable what it knows nothing about. Let us emphasize that again: the presence of a book in the listings does not necessarily mean that it is really available to be bought if its listed availability is --availability not specified--: you have to click on that book title to see the details to find out for sure. (If the details page also returns --availability not specified--, reload it once or twice to see if you can get a real availability listing.) This is purely an Amazon problem and has nothing to do with our search software. "Show real books only?"The default setting (checked = Yes) will cause the results presented to you to omit all books for which:
We list those so that you can understand exactly what is being excluded. It is not impossible for a legitimate book title to contain one of the "taboo" words above, so if you are looking for such a book, turn this filter off. "Pages per block?"This setting is unique to these search pages, and it balances page speed against page content length in returning search results. It is quite similar to the "Items per page?" sort of settings you see on places like Google and Yahoo searches. The search performed from this page uses a special interface to Amazon's databases; Amazon returns results through that interface at a maximum of 10 "hits" per page returned to our search software. But this software is designed to present results to you in "blocks" (the results pages you will see) that each constitute the returns from a number of the short Amazon pages. This parameter controls how many Amazon 10-item pages are accumulated to make one page of display for you. The smaller the number, the faster you will see results: setting the value to 1, so that each page you see is the contents of but one Amazon 10-item page, is the fastest, but gives only a small number of results at a time. (Remember: if you leave the "available only" and "real books only" filters on, you will usually discard a substantial fraction--often a large majority--of the raw results Amazon returns on its pages; it is not uncommon for even several Amazon pages combined to return no "available |