mysteries

I've been keeping an eye on the page for Aqueduct's "amazonfail" book, Centuries Ago and Very Fast, since Thursday, when it lost its sales ranking. (Until the amazonfail story broke, I just assumed it was another screw-up, which occasionally just happens to our pages. For instance, changing the spelling of "Alanya to Alanya" to "Alany to Alanya," or inserting a review for Filter House into the middle of a review for Stretto.) Although Centuries still doesn't have a sales rank, a few changes have occurred in the last 24 hours. For one thing, Centuries now comes up when I search for works by Rebecca Ore. For another, about half a dozen proposed tags have been removed from the page, leaving only two tags: "amazonfail" and "time travel." (I don't have exact recall of all the tags removed, but I think they may all have had "gay" in them.)

Does that mean Amazon is going to "solve" its "glitch" by removing tags that have the word "gay" in them? And I wonder: did they leave the "amazonfail" tag to help them identify pages that have been affected by their "glitch"? I have no knowledge of programming, so I can't even begin to guess what's going on. But I do wonder where those suggested tags--- "Tags Customers Associate with This Product"--- came from in the first place. In the case of Centuries' page, neither the author nor the publisher put them there, and since the page states "No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet," I assume that no customers put them there, either. Anybody know what that's about?