Searching Amazon.com’s Long Tail
We have all heard of the long tail right?
I was captivated by the concept and wondered what hidden gems might be available if I could search the long tail.
The problem was, How do I search the long tail?
It wasn’t clear to me at all how I could do that at Amazon.com, and their web API doesn’t allow it either.
So we’ve gone about to build one.
There is now a little checkbox below the search box. It’s labeled ‘Search the long tail’. If you check it, TicTap will search for products with sales ranks of at least 100,000 that matches all and some of the keywords.
Why 100,000? It turns out that between 25-36% of Amazon’s sales occur within their long tail, which are (probably) products with sales ranks of at least 100,000.
For an example, try this long tail search on George Bush.
Tell us what you think about our long tail search, and how we can improve it.
August 24th, 2005 at 10:24 am
Looks like it’s not working. I tried keyword “Salinger”, and the first hit is:
Dream Catcher : A Memoir
Authors: Margaret A. Salinger
Category: Book , Paperback
with a sales rank of 36568.
I was hoping that this would also work with random — pick a random long tail item, but it wasn’t that long a tail!
C
August 24th, 2005 at 11:09 pm
Hey Crispy,
Tks for trying us out!
I just checked and the amazon page for the book Dream Catcher: A Memoir shows that the sales rank is 129496.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671042823/ref=nosim/tictap-20/
Can you please explain how you got 35658?
Hmm.. long tail for random? That could be done! Give us 2 days to get this done ok?
Thanks!