Posted by Jonathan on February 8, 2003, at 0:04:24
In reply to Re: Amazon link, posted by noa on February 6, 2003, at 22:01:06
In addition to being the title of Judith Rossner's book, "August" seems to be a popular (and somewhat embarrassing) name which some parents bestow upon children born in the month of May ;)
This (or an author whose surname is "August") accounts for most of the 7717 books found, showing that the search-engine looks for the word "August" in the author's/authors' name(s) as well as in the book title. The remainder have titles which include the word "August", like the default choice "Disability Workbook ... Expanded August 2001".
Since the author-name field in Amazon's database is being searched, a simple way to eliminate many of the unwanted hits, while keeping the book we wish to recommend, is to put the author's name in the double double quotes along with the title, like this "August Judith Rossner".
This works: there was only one book for me to choose from — the right one. It's not completely satisfactory, however, because it's not obvious to the reader that the first word inside the double double quotes is the title and the other two are the author's names. Fortunately, the example in Dr Bob's FAQ provides a clue to how we may improve on this.
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/faq.html#amazon
Suppose I wish to recommend Dr Bob's book "E-Therapy"; I cannot recall the remaining 11 words of its full title, but I remember the author's surname. If I put double double quotes around "E-Therapy", as in the FAQ, the search-engine will find 1062 books of which the book I wish to link is number 91. Downloading up to 107 pages of links before I find the right book is a very unattractive prospect because I live in a backward region of a backward country where my only choice of internet connection is through a slow, dial-up British Telecom line.
Surely there can't be as many as 1062 books with the word "E-Therapy" in the title; nor are there likely to be many authors named "E-Therapy"! What seems to have happened is that the search engine (or Dr Bob's Perl script) has treated the hyphen "-" as a space separating two words, "E" and "Therapy"; most of the books found have the word "therapy" in their title and an author called "Forename E. Surname", like book number 93 in the FAQ example.
Perhaps all non-alphanumeric characters will be treated in the same way as "-": if I put "E-Therapy (Hsiung)" in double double quotes, perhaps the third word searched for, along with "E" and "Therapy", will be not "(Hsiung)", which is not a plausible author's name, but "Hsiung", which is. Yes, it works: instead of 1062 books, the search-engine found just one — the right one! (A long time ago, Tabßitha and I had a lot of fun with the discovery that Dr Bob's server script ignores non-alphanumeric characters in posting names, too!)
Similarly, "August (Rossner)" makes the search-engine find the book Noa wished to recommend and no other.
Kar deserves most of the credit for discovering this useful 'cyber-hug for the author' format: she nominated "The Hours (Michael Cunningham)" and three other books for the Book Club Book of the Month in http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20020616/msgs/830.html .
I merely copied her post without changing the format, inserted the double double quotes, and noticed that it worked. Thanks, Kar. I intended to post this explanation nearly a month ago but have been feeling too miserable recently to post anything; at last I see a tiny glimmer of hope for the future.I don't wish to contradict Dr Bob's advice in http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20020829/msgs/1412.html :
the title alone in double double quotes is nearly always enough to find the required book without too many unwanted hits; and I recommend always trying this first.Judith Rossner's "August", however, is not the only recommendation that has resulted in an unmanageable number of hits — here are a couple more:
"The Source (James Michener)" http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20020829/msgs/1412.html
25139 hits without the author's name."To Life (Kushner)" http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/faith/20021001/msgs/1339.html
20859 hits without the author's name.I'm sorry, Noa: Dinah has pushed you down to third place in the competition for the greatest number of Amazon hits :)
Jonathan.
poster:Jonathan
thread:9091
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20021128/msgs/9114.html