Usually when I coin a word I do it as a joke. Today I’m impelled to do it on purpose.
Probably somebody else has invented a better word for a feature in a program, or appliance, or whatever, that’s supposed to make your life easier, and instead makes it more difficult…really annoyingly so.
Anybody use Amazon.com in the last day or so?
Does anybody know how to turn off the damn “Search Inside The Book” feature, so that it doesn’t bring up tens of thousands of useless, irrelevant items in a search for a single book?
This feature has great sucktionality. Used sparingly, used only when you want it, it would be super. But not all the time!!
Note also an associated piece of naughtiness about halfway down the “How It Works” page. You input your search terms. You get those tens of thousands of results thrown up to you. Let’s say that in the first page of results you see a sentence or so that looks like it’s from the book you need. (And bearing in mind the sheer number of results that come up, this seems unlikely.) You click on that sentence to see the rest of the page on which the sentence appears. But then it turns out that you’d better already be registered with Amazon.com as a customer…because if you’re not, you’ll get no result from clicking on that link you want. They’re holding the rest of your search for ransom until you give them your e-mail address and other personal info.
Normally I would resist going to the Barnes & Noble site. (Personal reasons, nothing important.) But this feature will drive me to that site if Amazon doesn’t fix it so that its use in searches is elective rather than imposed.
Just my opinion. I’ve always felt kindly toward Amazon, but they’re on the brink of losing my business.
