(no subject)

[arcanetrivia]

Okay, my own input on "Amazonfail" here.

As a cataloger myself, I can tell you that it is possible for a technical screw-up to cause the observed result. Without knowing more about Amazon's database I could not tell you how, precisely. (Even with knowing some more, it would probably be obscure to me as I doubt they are running Unicorn, so what I am about to describe is a hypothetical situation based on my own experiences.) On our own it would be something like "misconfigure a report that globally does something to subject heading indexes", which is easy to do if you are not scrupulously careful because there are lots of fiddly little options on many reports even in the GUI; those who venture to home-cook API scripts without first consulting Customer Care, beware!

I don't know if this was necessarily subject-category related (it could be some kind of invisible internal tagging Amazon applies, for instance), but if it was, since many books have multiple subject headings it is plausible to me that something some programmer did somewhere affected only certain titles that had the right "lucky" one or two, even while they happened to share subjects three and four or whatever with other titles, so the effect was that only part of the pool was masked.

NB I am not saying there is no problem here, merely that I think remarks like "nuh-uh, it was awfully selective to be just a mistake!" are underinformed about what is possible to occur with massive book databases.

Comments

[bohemianspirit.livejournal.com]

I understand that technical glitches happen, but as I've commented elsewhere, what bothers me is that Amazon is filtering results in this way in the first place. The purpose of a search engine is to return relevant results, not to try to decide what's "fit" for me to read. If I'm not interested in one or more of the results, I just don't go there. At least let me know what my options are, and let ME decide from there.

And yes, it's also more than a little disturbing that the top result on searching "homosexuality" is a book on how to "prevent" homosexuality in one's children. (As if such a thing were possible.) Got Homophobia?

NB: I am the single mother of a grown son, and the only thing I did to influence his sexual orientation (which turned out to be straight) was to assure him at the age of 15 that it's normal for a 15 year old to be horny all the time. ;-) Don't tell him I told you that.

[valkyriur.livejournal.com]

I think what people are forgetting is that no matter what happened, Amazon's fall back of "it is a glitch" is the best PR move they can make.

Whether they got hacked (one theory), there was a miscommunication (as described in one article) between programmers and policy, or it was a bad program.

Also, all these people need to STFU because it wasn't just "this" subject or "that" subject. Amazon has said over 52,000 books were effected by this. A bunch of people are under the impression that it was only gay/lesbian and erotic. It was much more than that. And, frankly, Amazon, like many search engines, may need to make a safe search soon enough.

[lilyevans-snape.livejournal.com]

I'm so in the dark. Is there a news article on this out there somewhere. I've not even heard a thing about this.