Amazon filters

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 14:47:06 +0000

I think it's high time Amazon offered me the ability to personalize my browsing experience at their online store. Here is why:

I received a gift of The Algebraist on Audio CD this Swik season. It's a 7hr abridgement, narrated by the excellent Anton Lesser, and, at the end of disc-1, I have to say it's very promising. This is my first exposure to Iain M. Banks although I have enjoyed many of his non sci-fi novels (esp. Walking on Glass and The Crow Road).

On a whim, and with a fistful of Swik money burning a hole in my pocket, I thought I would go browse Amazon for other sci-fi audio (I love audio books) but I have to say it's a frustrating experience if you're not looking for work by J.K.Rowling, Terry Pratchet, C.S.Lewis, or Philip Pullman.

I mean what the hell are Harry Potter, Narnia, or Discworld doing in the sci-fi general category anyway? I appreciate that these are popular books, I liked Northern Lights, but I find it irritating that you can't move for endless copies of this stuff.

Certainly I would appreciate it if Amazon would discontinue lumping science-fiction and fantasy together. Bookshops do it to my continual irritation but they have space and sorting problems that Amazon just don't struggle with. When you're an online store with a (hopefully) sophisticated engine I think it's pretty much unforgivable.

Cynically I have to think that this is a tactic to put works by the popular authors du jour in front of me. Maybe this works for them but it doesn't work for me. I am not buying Harry Potter books and if I can't browse to find things I actually will buy then I am going to take my cash elsewhere.

Before I give up on trying to browse Amazon completely I wonder if any enterprising soul has created a front-end (perhaps using Amazon Web Services) that allows you to filter your browsing experience? For example by allowing me to negative weight authors I know I am not interested in so that they appear, consistently, at the end of search results?

The trail unblazed

Sat, 27 May 2006 15:46:05 +0100

I was just noodling around through a list of open source Mac applications when I came across TrailBlazer which turned out to be a full browser that has an excellent set of features for understanding your browsing history and searching pages you've visited.

It's like a souped up version of the BrowseBack utillity. I ended up not liking BrowseBack very much because of the system load I seemed to incur for having it and because the UI really didn't suit me.

TrailBlazer's "path through the forest" visual metaphor works very nicely. What a pity it was a separate browser (although in 2004 maybe that made more sense) and that it seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on browsing

Amazon filters

The trail unblazed