on the amazon fail thing

[burntcopper]

Where they de-ranked 'adult' content, and removed various books from the search results - large amounts of gay content, rape, feminism, but oddly, not Playboy. Can't see what they're doing there, can you? Dear author explains why the ranking thing is so important to sales

here's hoping they grovel. And lose a fuckload of custom. Sadly, not mine, because i stopped buying from Amazon a long time ago when play.com started being my baby - easily searchable, lack of 'wtf' 'you bought this, why not buy this' results, and free shipping.

Comments

[gmh.livejournal.com]

As we noticed, they de-ranked 'adult content'; but sex toys still seem to be ranked with the rest of their merchandise.

Which seems somewhat bizarre.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

tehdely provides a pretty convincing theory (http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html) about it being planned by ban-happy lot (also see the lj strikethrough for an example), ie, specifically targeting certain stuff - but still, Amazon looks like it's tried to cover its arse without actually looking at it - a blanket fix-all. But seriously, the customer service is really a masterpiece of fail.

Hmm. Dear Author (http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/04/12/amazon-possibly-using-category-metadata-to-filter-rankings/) has just posted with something that seems they're going by metadata keywords - the Playboy book is listed as 'nude', and there's the interesting distinction between the Barrowman autobiography hardback (hit by the debacle) and the paperback (easy to find in searches) - the paperback doesn't have the category 'Gay & lesbian'.