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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Dance, 3; looks, 10

October 24, 2003 by Terry Teachout

I was going to point out the obvious flaw in amazon.com’s new book-searching feature, but Bookslut beat me to it:

Amazon.com has completed its newest sparkly addition. Now when you search for a keyword, it searches the text of 120,000 nonfiction books and offers them in your results. I’m sure this is handy in some way. I bet people all over are rejoicing. But all I know is that when I was searching for “curing pig” in an attempt to find the book “Curing the Pig” by Liza Granville, I got 6,454 results, none of the first page results being the book. When I searched for Liza Granville, I got 202 results, none of the first page results being the book. I had to type in the damn ISBN number to find it. I’m sure this is handy, but you can’t turn it off. It just clutters up simple searches, hiding what you’re really looking for. Wired, however, calls the move ingenious.


Amazon.com is also having a contest to see how their “Search Inside the Book” feature has changed your life. Do you think if I bitch and complain that the feature is not optional I’ll win a Segway?

Granted, it really is fun to search your own name, as BuzzMachine seems to have been the first to point out (and yes, that’s the very first thing I did). But it’s only fun once. So I really do hope amazon.com figures out quickly that “Search Inside the Book” needs an on-off switch. Like, say, tomorrow.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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