fun with search

Dear large online bookseller:

Your search algorithms could use some work. When I search by title for a Latin American archaeology book called Stories in Red and Black, I do get that book in the search results; I also get lots of results for a series of pornographic ebooks that invoke a particular racial stereotype.

(I'm particularly curious as to how "red" is picking up these results, since that word is not in the visible metadata. But I'm not curious enough to click on one of the results and see if the word's in the copy; the titles, covers, and series name already make me want to bleach my brain by reading some high-quality slash fanfic.)

While I have issues with your major competitor and their search engine (who is giving us trouble with a different book that isn't popular enough to show up on the first page of results even when its exact title is entered), their search engine does not generally cause me to say "thank $DEITY I have a work-related reason to perform this search, because otherwise I'd hate to explain to this to my boss if she walked in and saw these results".

Yours sincerely,
A bemused client