Dodgy Search

I was making a comment on my friends blog and was too lazy to walk to the other room and check the title of a book on my shelf (The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy). So I tried searching Amazon.com with a few different combinations, such as New York Times Book Foreign Policy, which yields 48 results. They are mostly about crossword puzzles and you have to go to #21 (second page) for the singular result revelant to "Foreign Policy". The book I was looking for did not show up.

Maybe I should be thankful I got all books in my search results! The search New York Times Book has as its #5 result Sudoku Pro - Wildly Popular and Addictive Numbers Game That Challengers a Players Math & Logic Skills - it's an electronic Su Duko game. It has nothing to do with "New York" or the "New York Times" or "York" or "New" or "Times". And it is certainly not "Book".

How did I find the book title? (Certainly not by getting off my lazy butt and walking to the other room!) Googling the same text - New York Times Book Foreign Policy site:amazon.com - gives my book as the #2 result. (Google is the best thing since sliced bread).

And it's not my lame search text that is tripping up Amazon. Try something like To Kill A Mockingbird and the first result has no image, and is a used listing for $29. Hardly, the canonical entry for a famous book. How about Red Storm Rising? The first result is the book by Tom Clancy, but it has no image associated with it and it is a (used) Chinese version. Searching Amazon doesn't even give me books that I'm capable of reading!