Yesterday, Amazon searches were not pulling up Lauren Southern’s new book Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation.
At the time of these screenshots, it was already marked by Amazon as a BESTSELLER on the US Amazon site:
Now observe what happens when I searched for “Lauren Southern” (without quotes), in All categories:
Some random Lauren, a cookbook, T-shirts, etc.
How does the author’s native 🇨🇦Canada🇨🇦 do? No quotes around name:
Much better here!
Before I finished this post, a search (without quotes) for “lauren southern” on the US Amazon site started giving a prominent result on the first page for her new book. But “lauren southern” with quotes still did not find the book.
A search for another author in quotes for comparison:
There’s a lot of political bias on the part of various big companies. Twitter famously censored Milo. Amazon has been accused of bias itself.
I’m not sure what caused these search problems. But whatever the reason, having messed up search results for a new bestseller on one of the biggest retail sites, for even part of day (especially right before Christmas) can have a big impact on sales. So even if its just incompetence, its a disgrace for Amazon. And if its intentional that’s even worse.