Amazon's Odd ISBN Problem

Amazon has some serious search problems. The one that bugs me most is the lack of any kind of authority control: if you click on the author's name in a record, it should pull up other books by that author, not do a keyword search on the author's first and last names. At least now it seems to be an exact phrase search; it used to bring up anything that had the author's first OR last name. BN uses the same search.

Libraries have been using name authority records forever; would it be so difficult for online book search products to assign a unique ID to an individual author and use that for author searches? It seems like particularly bad database design to not have a separate author table that can be used to limit a search. Or maybe they've found that people are more likely to impulse-buy if they get a lot of irrelevant hits from their searches…

I've greatly hated that myself. Not sure about Amazon but on ABE if you search for a book by, say, Bill Smith you get results that include books written by a team like Bill Lee and Joe Smith. Can be a nusiance with some names.

I personally have had no problems searching for books on Amazon by ISBN number. What ISBN numbers were you searching for?

You don't really think I kept track of those ISBNs do you?

It was an off and on again problem my partner and I both had. Haven't for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe it is fixed.

Amazon faces huge issues of scale. I don't expect perfection and assume they are always working to have the best (most profitable) results possible.