Amazon Search Fail, An Observation

Have you ever noticed that the Amazon search function has some serious flaws at times?  It's amazing how I can look for item 'one two three,' and after a few decent results, you start seeing things whose names might or might not have parts of 'one two three' in them.

You would think it's a flaw, but if you were trying to sell things, you'd probably redirect clients left and right to sell as much as you can.

Here's a great chase around the tree search I had fun with:

The other day I was looking for the song, Counting Stars, by OneRepublic.

When I went to Amazon, doing a search for OneRepublic gave me the following list:

-Apologize     OneRepublic
-Good Life     OneRepublic
-Secrets     OneRepublic
-Counting Stars (Radio Version)     High Level Tunes
-Beethoven's 5 Secrets     The Piano Guys-Good Life     OneRepublic
-Counting Stars (In the Style of One Republic) [Karaoke Version]     Ameritz Karaoke Planet
-All The Right Moves     OneRepublic
-Apologize (Album Version) [feat. OneRepublic]     Timbaland

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We played the Counting Stars (Radio Version) and it sounded right, but we noticed it wasn't from OneRepublic.  It was from High Level Tunes.

We did a search for 'Counting Stars one republic mp3' and received the following set of results by tribute bands from Amazon:

-Counting Stars (Radio Version)     High Level Tunes
-Counting Stars In The Style Of One Republic Instrumental Karaoke - Single     Instrummer
-Counting Stars (In the Style of One Republic) [Karaoke Version]     Ameritz Karaoke Planet
-We'll Be Counting Stars     Zap Monkees
-Counting Stars (Original Version)     Cyriaque
-Counting Stars in the Style of One Republic [Karaoke Backing Track]     Sunfly Karaoke
-Counting Stars (Karaoke Version) [In the Style of One Republic]     Karaoke Universe
-Counting Stars (Originally Performed By One Republic) [Karaoke Version]     Karaoke NYC
-Counting Stars (In the Style of One Republic) [Karaoke Version]     The Karaoke Studio
-Counting Stars (In the Style of One Republic) [Instrumental Version]     The Karaoke Studio
-Counting Stars (Acoustic Version)     Cyriaque
-Counting Stars (Instrumental Version)     High Level Tunes
-Counting Stars     We'll Be Alright

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If you notice, not a single result from OneRepublic.

I was befuddled.  I had to leave Amazon, ind the song on iTunes, discovered what album it was a part of there.  Then I went to Amazon, looked up the album with "one republic native mp3" but we got Waking Up MP3 Exclusive.  But no Counting Stars.

I finally did the search for "one republic mp3," but no results.  Then just "one republic."

I finally did the one word version of their name, OneRepublic, and we finally saw the album in the results that we wanted and clicked on that.

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This isn't the first time we encountered some funky search results from Amazon but was surprised that such a huge distributor had such iffy results for something I presume is much bigger than most of the stuff I search for.

Oh, btw, if you too were looking for the song/album, here you go:  Native (Deluxe) [+digital booklet]

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