Amazon API search results vs. Amazon.com search results

Question

For our web app, which will use Amazon's API as a basis for some of the site's main interactions, we required the ability to do a generalized search of Amazon's products and return results based on relevancy. The expectation was that their API would work exactly like their actual site's search.

Unfortunately it does not. For instance, querying "joy of cooking" does not return a link to the famous cook book, but to some food processor. Contrarily, on the actual site, one would see the book isn't just first, but it and any derivations occupy the top 5 or so results.

Is there a way of getting this level of relevancy search from Amazon's API without specifying a node to browse through? We need to be able to search everything at once, and the API seems very limited on parameter sets.

Answer 1

The answer is that, if you use "All" as your sorting basis, rather than "Blended", you will get results that are inline with Amazon's own product search. Older docs don't seem to account for this discrepency, but testing both methods has shown "All" to be the preferred product sorting method.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/2010-11-01/DG/

Pagesearch under "SearchIndex: All"

You don't get any item sorting options with this method, but if all you want is "most relevant" results, this is the preferred method.