sholio | ... and the not so happy: fail, Amazon.com, FAIL.

... and the not so happy: fail, Amazon.com, FAIL.

So this is all over my f'list tonight and it's probably redundant for me to post on it at this point, but: Amazon.com has removed the sales rankings from books that it deems "adult", which (among other things) prevents them from showing up in searches from the main page of the site. Amazon's definition of "adult" content includes some heterosexual erotica and pretty much every book on the site with GLBT content regardless of whether it contains actual sex or not. Like, for example, autobiographies or self-help books or the children's book "Heather Has Two Mommies". Go on, go to Amazon's main page and type that title into the search box. NO RESULTS. The topmost and only related result (when I do it) is an article on the controversy over the book. Similarly, if you type "homosexuality" into the main search box, what you get is a bunch of books on "deprogramming" gay people, which apparently are the only sort that didn't get unranked by Amazon.

WHAT. What. WHAT.

If you are specifically searching within the "book" category, things seem to work more or less normally, but I am still getting anomalous results on authors who've had their sales ranking taken away, like typing an author's name and getting a bunch of similar authors come up before the one I want -- an obvious result of not having a sales ranking, which is apparently is at least part of what Amazon uses to determine how high in the rankings a given result will score. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that this WILL hurt an author's sales, especially the whole "not being able to find it from the main page" thing.

I'm too sleepy to get my brain to cooperate on itemizing all of the ways in which this is rage-inducing. So I link. Also,

telesilla makes the point (probably paraphrased badly by half-asleep me) that the issue of whether Amazon wants to make erotica searchable on its front page is a separate issue from the fact that they've basically made the sweeping judgment that gay porn =/= straight porn and, worse, that gay content of any sort is tantamount to porn even if it's something light, cute, fluffy and suitable for all ages. I mean, yes, the idea that the search box on Amazon's front page does not return results on all of their books (without saying so) is infuriating, but not even a small part as infuriating as the judgment call that they're making on what constitutes inappropriate search results.

Seriously, how much all-ages stuff has romance in it? Cinderella? Bambi? How much of it has couples of any sort, even just in walk-on parts? You really want to make all of that unsearchable, Amazon? Or explain why certain kinds of couples, of people, are okay for your customers to search for while others aren't?

I'm going to bed and see if the word makes more sense in the morning.

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Even more appalling is what happens when you type in Homosexuality in the search box. Mine came back with "A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality." Like the most important book they can list on homosexuality is how to prevent it. WTF?

*nods* Yeah, I'd noticed that. WTF? doesn't even begin to cover it.

I bought my nephew's birthday present from Play.com yesterday rather then my normal default of amazon.co.uk as a response to this latest Fail. But I am watching the blogsphere as potentially this is a lot more complicated:

http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html

*nods*
That post was interesting. Given timing and Amazon's history with business sense, I'm thinking (hoping?) there might be more going on here than what the blogosphere is assuming. I mean, Amazon is owned/run by a liberal guy in Seattle and does well BECAUSE it makes smart business decisions.

I'm holding out judgment for at least 24 hours. Can't really expect them to respond on a Sunday, much less Easter Sunday.

Yeah, waiting 24 hours was my thought, too; Amazon.com is screwing up here, but I think it's more in "clueless public relations" than "major league company goes blatantly homophobic and hopes not to be noticed."

Yeah; I'm not jumping ship immediately -- I want to see if they'll fix it and, if so, how quickly. But this is definitely making me take a look at other online bookstores. I'd gotten very complacent about using Amazon for everything -- it's simple, it's easy, I maintain my wishlist as a shopping list and just pick things off there when I'm making an order. But if nothing else, I think this is a good reminder that Amazon's virtual monopoly over online book sales isn't a good thing. There are other bookstores out there, and I'm thinking that I might spread my shopping around a little more.

Yeah; I think this metadata theory makes more sense because of a few things people have pointed out about the other one (that there's no obviously visible way on Amazon pages to report objectionable material; that it's apparently been going on for some time on a very small scale, but hadn't really affected a lot of authors until recently). Still, while I'm not jumping ship from Amazon immediately, I *am* looking at other online stores and questioning my tendency to hit Amazon first whenever I have something to buy. Even if they resolve it quickly, I think that it makes more sense to patronize some of the smaller stores for a while and try not to encourage Amazon's near monopoly over online book sales.

Also, you can't even turn off their net nanny. Even for an unbroken function like that, that would actually only affect somewhat explicit content rather than shoving LGBT books in some dank below the counter corner, you should be able to turn it off, like the various "safe search" options in regular search engines.

Yeah; as much as I am not a fan of "wrap your kids in bubble wrap" parenting, it does make sense from a PR standpoint for Amazon to have some kind of safe-search function that parents could enable. An optional feature. But I damn well want to know if it's turned on, and how to turn it off, rather than just assuming (as I would have, before all of this) that if I type in a book title, Amazon will show me it if it's got it. And of course that doesn't even touch the delisting of books with gay and lesbian content regardless of what they are...

If you search on amazon.com (not amazon.de!) from out of Germany, the book is there. Its not on place 1 on the list, but its on the first page.

Searching on amazon.de it was on place one on the finding list.

Actually, you're right, though I hadn't scrolled down far enough to see those -- but they're out-of-print or unavailable editions of the book. You have to search within "books" in order to have the current, available edition of the book pop up as the top search result. And who knows about that? If I'd just vaguely heard of the book and didn't know that you get different search results from the front page, I'd assume that it was out of print.

Sadly, the world hasn't started to make sense here. But that's possibly because I couldn't sleep, I was so upset about this. I think the thing that broke me was the top search result for "homosexuality". Although it is interesting to note that if you do a search on "asexuality", "bisexuality", and "transgender" you get the results you would expect. However, if you search "homophobia" the results are normal except for the bizarre: Understanding Paranoia: A Guide for Professionals, Families, and Sufferers.

So... yeah... still making no sense here. It's just so blatant and heavy-handed I'm having a hard time believing this was intentional by the company itself, and not some person with a grudge trying to make life miserable for either Amazon, or the GLBT community.

Sadly, the world hasn't started to make sense here.

Dammit!!! I had such high hopes!

One theory right now is that Amazon delisted the books based on their metadata. This would certainly explain anomalies like Kindle editions or out-of-print editions of books still showing up (because they don't have much metadata) or the "how to deprogram your gay teen" books showing up because they didn't have "gay" as a metadata keyword. And all it would really take is one or two Amazon employees/programmers being told to remove "adult" material from the front page search listings and being given too much leeway to determine what constitutes adult material.

(I may be giving them too much benefit of the doubt, but it has a certain Occams-razor simplicity to it.)

It does seem to me that a lesson from Google's 'safe search' option is called for.

Also, some basic PR skills about sane usage and selling on the internet...

Yeah; as much as I am not a fan of "wrap your kids in bubble wrap" parenting, it does make sense from a PR standpoint for Amazon to have some kind of safe-search function that parents could enable. An OPTIONAL feature. But I damn well want to know if it's turned on, and how to turn it off, rather than just assuming (as I would have, before all of this) that if I type in a book title, Amazon will show me it if it's got it. And of course that doesn't even touch the delisting of books with gay and lesbian content regardless of what they are...

As someone who doesn't frequent Amazon, why would removing the sales rating make a difference if the person wants to buy the material? I don't see what that would be blocking. It's like reading a fic with no reviews on the net, seems it shouldn't matter.

But that misdirection when typing in "homosexuality" is just wrong. Could it have been hacked by some religious fanatic trying to make their point?

Actually, when it comes to fic that matters to a lot of people. And I'd think it's prbably the same way with books for some, too; people tend to assume things a lot of other people liked might be better... even when it proves wrong all the time.

I don't hold much stock in net review numbers. I've seen too many ill-written stories have hundreds or "I like it" reviews while the good, deep material is neglected because it doesn't "cater to the masses".

Well, the big problem isn't having the sales number on the page with the book -- I'm sure the commenters are right that some people put some stock in those, but the big problem is that things that are searched from the main page which don't have sales rankings just don't show up -- or are way down in the search results even if they are on there. So you can know the title and author, even, and type them in, and not find what you're looking for.

AH. Yes, that would definitely be a problem. Damn. That's just wrong on so many levels.

Just did a quick search on the first name that came to mind. Keith Hartman's novels (gay/pagan/sci-fi mysteries) still have sales ranking info on their pages, while his nonfiction book on homosexuality and organized religion does not. So the new filter is missing some things, but it still is FULL OF FAIL.

Oh, also here's a link to a C|Net article (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10217715-93.html?tag=mncol) that compares how a lot of heterosexual explicit works escaped the new purge, while very innocuous GBLT works were filtered. It also quotes Amazon saying that it's a "glitch." :-p

It's really nice to see that the media is picking this up, which makes it more likely that it'll be resolved quickly!

I am angry about this on two fronts: the obvious inequity of the filtering, and the fact that as a customer, I don't want to be patronized by a store that won't even tell me it's filtering out some of the books that I might be searching for.

Homosexuality is still offline, but "gay sex" is back! Or they somehow missed it. For now I'm going to be optimistic.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=gay+sex&x=0&y=0

Yeah, they do seem to be fixing things. I imagine the public outcry is pretty much responsible for it.

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... and the not so happy: fail, Amazon.com, FAIL.

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