Amazon renames 'Search Suggestion' feature to emphasize 'tags'

Amazon has renamed its user-generated search term feature called "Search Suggestions." Now the feature is called "Tags for Amazon Search."

Now a link appears on each book detail page labeled "Help others find this product - tag it for Amazon search." Clicking the link takes users to a form like this.

For the past year, Search Suggestions has enabled any Amazon user -- customers, authors, or publishers -- to suggest new search terms for a book or other product. For example, the Beatles' 1968 album with a plain white cover is popularly known as "The White Album," even though that's not the title. Using a Search Suggestion, Amazon users can suggest keywords (such as "White Album") to ensure the product shows up in search results, even though the keywords might not appear in the title or text.

By adding the word "tag" to its Search Suggestion feature, Amazon runs the risk of confusing this feature with a different feature known simply as "tags." It appears the two features will remain separate.

For about 18 months, Amazon has allowed users to assign tags to books, such as "mystery novel," "Sherlock" or "birthday present." Users can search their own tags to locate items, or consult all the tags used by Amazon's customer base. By default, Amazon tags are publicly viewable.
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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

Amazon tags now available in RSS feeds

There's a new RSS feed system for Amazon tags. You can aggregate Amazon feeds in a news reader.

On most tag pages you'll find an orange RSS icon and the label "RSS feed." That means you can subscribe to track new products added to the tag or new discussions posted on Amazon's site.

For example, you can subscribe to the tag murder mystery to be notified of new books given that tag. The interesting thing is the feeds pass an Amazon Associates ID, giving a revenue opportunity to bloggers.

Three other things you can do:

1. Embed a widget on your site to show an updated list of the most popular products for that tag, such as wii game, and earn referral credit through the Associates program
2. Create special tags for your books or book club and publish feeds of recommended books to your members
3. Export products and tags into another application, creating your own mashup

You can also limit the RSS feed to tags used by a single person -- yourself or any other Amazon customer.

For step-by-step instructions on building the links to these feeds, see this Amazon Associates blog post.

Plugging your book into social-networking sites

Here's a follow-up recent posts about tags, MySpace, and Amazon's Web 2.0 features like book recommendations and Search Inside the Book.

Everyone knows these fancy features help people discover your book on Amazon. But these features can help people find your book outside Amazon, too.

Here's an example from my experience:

A few months ago I noticed that my new title Plug Your Book! began surfacing on dozens and dozens (perhaps hundreds or thousands) of Squidoo lenses pertaining to MySpace. Here are three examples -- if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you'll see Amazon Associates links for my book:

Are you utilizing MySpace traffic?

MySpace.com Blogging - How To Do It RIGHT

Explosively Powerful Blog Marketing For Business Owners

I had nothing to do with these Squidoo pages, so I was surprised to see my new book being featured there. (Squidoo pages are written by independent experts and entrepreneurs, here's more information.)

So, how did my book show up on all these Squidoo pages? I knew darned well that most of these people didn't know about my book. MySpace isn't in the title or subtitle of my book, although it does figure prominently in one chapter.

An intriguing point: I had submitted "MySpace" as an Amazon Search Suggestion for my book but Amazon rejected the term with no explanation.

It was only after my book was indexed for Search Inside the Book that my book surfaced on these Squidoo pages. I doubt any of these people writing these Squidoo pages knew about my book. In other words, it's not a personal recommendation from them, it's just a feed from Amazon based on their keywords.

Having said all this, I'd be surprised if this exposure on Squidoo has generated more than a handful of sales. But I guess every little bit helps.

Tags vs. Categories: Which Amazon feature is more useful?

Which Amazon features are the most effective in encouraging consumers to buy books? Many people say it's book reviews and Search Inside the Book.

In a recent discussion, one publisher asserted that Search Inside is obviously Amazon's most effective feature. It allows browsers to mimick the same thing they enjoy doing at a real bookstore -- thumbing through pages.

What's the proof? Just look at Amazon's book detail pages, the publisher said:

Amazon has chosen to position Search Inside the Book at perhaps the single most prominent position on the book detail page, the top left corner. If it didn't help sales significantly, it wouldn't have that real estate.

You should think of Amazon's detail page as a huge, peer-reviewed, massively data-tested experiment in what content elements do the most to help book sales online. The evolution of the content and layout of the detail page reflects their learnings over time.

I think this gives Amazon far too much credit. I'm also a fan of Search Inside, but as far as I can tell, there is no rigorous testing of consumer behavior before the company rolls out new features or prioritizes existing features.

Take this one example: Tags and Categories. The Tags feature appears prominently on Amazon book detail pages, three levels above Amazon's most popular feature, book reviews.

I'd bet far less than a half of one percent of Amazon customers know what a Tag is, and fewer have ever used the feature. Many consumers who have used Tags on Amazon have done it in a counterproductive way (such as tagging a book "Grandma's Xmas present). The most prolific users of tags on Amazon are authors, who spam the feature with redundant or inappropriate tags. In my opinion, this feature's utility for consumers is practically zero.

On the other hand, Categories are familiar to everyone who's ever walked into a library or bookstore. But on Amazon this feature languishes near the bottom of detail pages, with many (perhaps most) books categorized incorrectly or incompletely.

Where are the Categories, such as Books > Fiction > Mystery? Scroll way, way, down near the bottom, past several advertisements and half-baked, unused features like Amapedia wikis and "Customer Discussions" and you'll find Categories.

I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, and I'd probably buy a lot more if Amazon invested more in classifying products into browsable categories so I could find what I want.

The Amazon employee who is in charge of the Tags feature would probably assert that customers will do a better job of classifying books using Tags than Amazon employees can by working in its catalog department. But at the rate it's going, this could take 50 years.

Book tagging lags at Amazon; soars at LibraryThing

They've crunched some numbers at LibraryThing, and with much smaller user base, the social-networking site has accumulated ten times as many book tags as Amazon.

The score:

LibraryThing, 13 million
Amazon, 1.3 million

What's the problem with tagging at Amazon? It's simple, says LibraryThing found Tim Spalding: E-commerce and tagging don't mix.

"You can't get your customers to organize your products unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton."

Amazon's tags are often smart alecky. At LibraryThing, users tend to take things more seriously.

Here's more analysis on LibraryThing's blog.

Media Library: Amazon's social-networking answer to LibraryThing?

Amazon users can tag books within a personalized section of the site called Your Media Library.

Here you can view all your previous purchases and buy online access to eligible hard-copy books you've already bought from Amazon. You can organize your Media Library by tagging individual books this way:

-- Click on the book to select it, and bibliographic information will be displayed at the top of the screen.

-- Any currently used tags for the book will be displayed just below.

-- Click the Add button to enter tags. If you’ve created other tags previously, a list of similar tags is shown below the edit box.

-- Type in a new tag or click a suggested tag and click OK to save the tag.

Once you're using tags, it's best to try to reuse tags to designate the same association. For example, don't use "art deco" and "artdec" for the same things. Consult the list of your most frequently used tags, which pops up when you're tagging.

Although it's used by a relatively small portion of Amazon users today, Media Library could become the hub of Amazon's social-networking strategy -— an avenue for customers to connect with others who have common interests, and building networks of like-minded book lovers.

Tagging: A new way of organizing and marketing books

A growing number of book lovers are using tags to provide their own way of classifying books. Amazon and some library online catalogs now allow users to use tags as a supplement to the hierarchical category system.

Book tagging allows people to assign trendy, granular labels to books -— nuances beyond the world's hippest, brainiest librarians. For example, there's no library category or Amazon tab for steampunk, a subgenre of speculative fiction. But using labels, aficionados can dissect it into all its subsubgenres, including timepunk, bronzepunk, stonepunk and clockpunk —- all terms that are deadly serious to steampunkers.

Likewise, there's all kinds of books that are lumped into "queer fiction," but there's no official book classifications for any of it. Traditional subject headings aren't relevant to personal identity, but tags fill the gap.

Tagging is an individual activity with global utility. Each of the 3.5 million books in Amazon's catalogue could be assigned its own unique "category" yet reside in thousands of other categories at the same time.

Amazon tags

Amazon added its tagging feature in 2005, and made it more prominent -— higher on book detail pages —- than its regular categories lists. Amazon tags are publicly viewable unless users designate them as private. You can manage your tags through a "Your Tags" field at the bottom of every Amazon page.

On Amazon, tags are another pathway for readers to discover your book. Authors and publishers can increase their visibility by adding the obvious keywords appropriate to their book. Amazon tags are indexed by Google and other search engines.

As more book readers begin tagging, finding niche content will become easier than ever. Tags assigned to obscure books will be rare. A few common tags will be used by huge numbers of users (book, read, buy, interesting) and are visible to everyone. But most tags, including the more useful ones, will be used by just a few users (bizarre apocalpytacism). Many tags may be used by just a few people, and assigned to just one or two books, enabling a niche of one.

On Amazon, you can view all your tags here.


Here you can add or delete tags, and designate them public or private. You can also edit or remove tag you've created by clicking on Edit from the book's product page.

You can view the tags for any Amazon customer who's made at least one purchase, unless they've chosen to keep their tags private.

Tagging books: A new way of organizing, classifying books

Tagging is a relatively new but increasingly popular way for Internet users to organize things by giving them personal keywords. It’s not mainstream yet, but some are calling tags “the Internet’s Dewey Decimal System.”

For a book like Gone With the Wind, you might assign tags like “Civil War,” “fiction” “epic,” and “romance.”

Users create tags for their own reasons, but they can be used by anyone, and provide an effortless, accurate recommendations system among people with similar tastes.

Tags aren’t limited to books, you can assign tags to practically anything. The site that pioneered tagging didn’t involve books, but photographs: Flickr is a social site where users store, organize and share digital photographs. Instead of using categories to organize pictures, like a folder labeled “2005 Vacation,” Flickr users tag their photos with one or two words, like “waterfall,” “solar eclipse,” “Houston,” or “Joe.” This way, photos can organized and found in several ways.

Tags are a form of metadata, which means, literally, “data about data.” Tagging creates a folksonomy, a bottom-up method of categorization or labeling. By contrast, a taxonomy is more top-down system used to show hierarchical relationships. Folksonomies are one way to combine topics and find connections that aren’t obvious through categorization.

Tags aren’t necessarily a replacement for top-down classification, but a supplemental means of organization and order. People can use their own tags and tags of others, as a way of tapping collective human intelligence. It’s a way for people to find the kind of niche content they’re looking for in from among the sea of available choices, and discover it in a democratic way from peers, not gatekeepers.

You can also tag books on Amazon and LibraryThing, a popular social-networking site for bibliophiles.