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Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is their bookstore search awful? I've tried various programming subjects (software, software engineering, computer graphics, etc.) and always get results like "Report of the 55th National Conference on Weights and Measures 1970" or "Veterans' Administration FY 1988 budget"

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If it's anything like the Android App Store search on my phone, I think I'll stick with my Kindle, or real books. I'm confused how a company that made search work so well has such poor offerings for things like my apps or these books. What gives?

Android App search is terrible. Now this bookstore is too.

You'd think Google could get search right.

GMail search is awful as well.

Same here. Searching for books I already own on Kindle returns completely different books unrelated to the book I am searching for. Searching for author and title does not help. For instance, searching for "probability theory sivia" returns books on biology, the JFK assassination, fish oil, "standards and expectations", theatre, etc., and one book on "Le raisonnemet bayesien" which may have something to do with probability theory. But it does not return the book on probability theory by Sivia.

Edit: See for yourself: http://books.google.com/ebooks?as_brr=5&q=probability+th...

Maybe it was a temporary problem. I did a search for machine learning and the results look fine to me: http://books.google.com/ebooks?q=machine+learning

Depends on your definition of "fine", here's the first 7 results from that URL:

  - Library of Congress 1993
  - Library of Congress subject headings 1980
  - Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series 1962
  - Mezzofanti's System of Learning Languages Applied to the Study of French. (Close, but no cigar)
  - Wildlife and oceans in a changing climate
  - Occupational outlook handbook

That's not what I see at Ben's link - the results I see are completely relevant:

Machine learning - Kai-Zhu Huang, Hai-Qin Yang, Irwin King

Machine learning techniques for multimedia - Matthieu Cord, Pádraig Cunningham

Advances in machine learning applications in software engineering - Du Zhang, Jeffrey J.-P. Tsai

Machine learning in cyber trust - Jeffrey J. P. Tsai

Machine learning for multimedia content analysis - Yihong Gong, Wei Xu

Data analysis, machine learning and applications - Christine Preisach

Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition - Petra Perner

Interesting, it hints at some "machine learning"/"behavioural targeting" on Google's end then.

The search excludes books that are not available for sale in your region, which probably includes everywhere outside the U.S.

You're not in the US, this is all you'll be able to see.

Try a US VPN :)

Yeah, it has some remarkable similarities to Google Video.

Same for me

Same here. And no advanced search?

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