Service at Amazon, the great online store I’ve dealt with for years, is either declining or getting selective. A friend of mine in Indonesia placed an order on June 19, received confirmation the same day, and then…. nothing. She queried the order twice, and I’ve queried it once, without any response. The bank hasn’t received any… Read More »
In case you haven’t heard, Amazon has launched its own search engine, A9 and a toolbar (for now compatible only with IE) which dovetails with your Amazon account. Supposed advantages over other search engines (here’s A9’s own list): Simultaneously searches Amazon’s book store while searching the web. Amazon book search results, and a history of your… Read More »
The future of newsfeeds: Trackable RSS. The biggest drawback to the commercial exploitation of RSS feeds — items from blogs and other websites, parceled up and delivered to users who request them — is that there’s no easy way for the producers of the RSS material to know very much about what their customers are… Read More »
Will all libraries eventually be digital? Seems a pretty obvious question (answer: yes) but the process is surprisingly slow. I do research online and use databases like Questia but there’s still a hell of a lot that hasn’t been made available. And a lot of what is scanned has not been scanned well, unless the… Read More »
Here’s another whacky trick that Google have quietly introduced, adding to the impression they are fast cementing their role as one-stop portal: Book searching. According to SearchEngineWatch (via the excellent TechDirt), Google Print is an experimental service that “indexes excerpts of popular books, blending the content from these works into regular Google search results”. These… Read More »