cornerhouse says:

I've experienced the following, off and on lately.

1) search for a book by title word(s) -- get no results
2) search for the same book by a author/title combination string -- no results
3) get the ISBN-10 from Amazon and search with that -- direct hit.

For instance, I wanted to add Nabokov's Bend Sinister. I searched with "bend sinister", "nabokov bend sinister", "nabokov sinister", and "nabokov bend" -- got no results.

But when I search with the ISBN (0679727272), I get a direct hit and all is well.

It seems to me that I should be getting hits on the title or author/title strings as well.

#1 Posted 1 years ago

danchamp says:

You should be getting results for those searches, and testing it just now I did.

Which suggests there's an intermittent problem when searching Amazon. I'll start recording every search made, the raw results received, and the number of records Revish thinks it should be displaying. This will allow me to get a better idea of where the problem lies, and hopefully to fix it.

#2 Posted 1 years ago

cornerhouse says:

I just tried it again (10:49 AM GMT -06) and experienced the same problem with "bend sinister" and "nabokov bend sinister" -- but it worked fine with "nabokov bend" and "nabokov sinister".

ISBN continues to work.

very strange.

#3 Posted 1 years ago

jessmonster says:

I've had a similar problem. So far I haven't used ISBNs, not having them on hand, but often a title search will return 0 results while an author search will get me a list. For instance, I just search "animal vegetable miracle" and got no results, while a search for "barbara kingsolver" brought up a list with that title at the top.

#4 Posted 1 years ago

abvr says:

I've been having similar problems today (5/9/07): No hits for any permutation of Ben Schneiderman's "Leonardo's Laptop" . . . no hits this morning for any permutation of Nathaniel Fick's "One Bullet Away" but it came up fine this afternoon . . . and (most bizarre) a search for Caroline Alexander's "The Bounty" pulls up several editions, but all without ISBNs (and so un-addable). Searching for its ISBN gives zilch.

I'm not sure *why* it's so flaky, but man is it ever . . .

#5 Posted 1 years ago

danchamp says:

Sorry for the lack of progress on this, I'm away earning money for another couple of days and will get straight onto this on my return on Saturday. Please bear with me.

One shortcut to get to any book's page (which is stable) is to enter the url manually:

http://www.revish.com/books/1234567890/

Where 1234567890 is the book's ISBN. I appreciate this is not ideal, but it should work for most titles.

#6 Posted 1 years ago

corwin says:

I have been having this problem sporadically as well. Sometimes a search returns results, other times it does not. The next day, the same search will give me results. This is true of both actual ISBNs and keywords.

#7 Posted 1 years ago

chrisko says:

I tried variations on Robert Penn Warren. First, only "warren" and "robert warren" were getting anything. Then "robert penn warren" got results. Now it doesn't anymore. But five minutes later it does.

That leads me to believe this might be a caching problem, but of course I could be wrong.

Also, unsuccessful searches take much longer to process. Isn't that odd, since it should just use Amazon's results?

#8 Posted 1 years ago

mrwalker says:

Any love on this one? I just tried searching for "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X".

This works:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/link-types/searchbox.html?mode=blended&tag=blether&keyword=0321503619

This doesn't:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/link-types/searchbox.html?mode=blended&tag=blether&keyword=Cocoa%28R%29+Programming+for+Mac%28R%29+OS+X+%283rd+Edition%29

#9 Posted 3 months ago