Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 142

tip
Because the rules for searching them are so different, we look at
two other kinds of trapping—conversations and tags—in chapter 9.
in chapter 8, i discuss the idea of trapping multimedia.
Trapping Commercial Information
Why would you want to ind commercial information? Maybe there's some-
thing you want to buy. Maybe you want to monitor Amazon for a certain
book. Maybe you want to see how well your industry's items sell on eBay.
Maybe you want to know when prices are going up or down. I know some
researchers disdain monitoring retail and commercial sites for informa-
tion, saying, “hose sites are only about prices.” But thanks to supply and
demand and capitalism, prices can give you an idea of how popular some-
thing is (or isn't), and if demand for things is trending up or down. And
besides, don't you really want to know when the next Terry Pratchett book
is coming out?
amazon
It might seem weird to start with Amazon (amazon.com) since it's an actual
store, not a price aggregation or comparison site. But Amazon is huge, it
sells practically everything, and it's popular enough that customers can in
some ways relect the tastes of the Internet as a whole—at least the Internet
in that country which Amazon is selling to (Amazon has several versions
for several diferent countries).
Searching Amazon
Amazon has the usual single query box at the top of its pages, but that isn't all
Amazon ofers by a long shot. Many of its categories of information have their
own advanced search engines. Let's look at topics, since that's what Ama-
zon is known for. Take a look at the Advanced Search page (the direct URL
is amazon.com/exec/obidos/ats-query-page/) and you can see that you can
search for a huge variety of features, including ISBN, keyword, format, reader
age, and so on. Other categories ofer feature searches more relevant to their
formats. he advanced search for DVDs is amazing ( Figure 7.19 )!