Blogging reporter Andrea James of the 148-year-old, now all-online Seattle Post-Intelligencer says
Amazon calls mistake ‘embarrassing and ham-fisted’Amazon.com has offered a response to the AmazonFail fiasco.
Because there’s so much attention to this, I’ll offer spokesman Drew Herdener’s comments unfiltered:
This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.
There have been a number of conspiracy theories going around the web, all of them plausible. According to actual Amazon people, what happened was an employee was dinking around in code used to filter raw porn (which Amazon catalogues and/or resells) from their more regular fair. The employee, at the company’s French subsidiary, evidently plugged in some keywords that sounded good to him and… since Amazon worldwide is effectively driven by a single database… he wiped out 50,000 plus titles worldwide instead of whatever handful he’d meant to wipe out in French.
Oops.
I learned web programming from a moonlighting Amazon employee. Over the years I’ve worked on commercial websites with several former Amazon employees. And, of course, I’ve developed or contributed to several dozen database-driven websites (including this one) and so… wow, does that local-change-goes-global story work for me.
Add that to their admission, from an official spokesperson, that they were embarrassingly ham-fisted about the whole thing, start to finish. And while I’m not at all above rubbing their noses in it if they don’t clean it up pretty darn quickly, professional courtesy and acute personal awareness of how bloody easy that sort of thing can be when the internal goal is as much interconnection of data as possible means I’m strongly inclined to forgive them. Not forget, forgive.
Because, seriously, it’s not something they, or we, ought to forget. Because this was a nice preview of what happens when you do forget! I’ve been as guilty as anyone of just defaulting to Amazon links, and I’ll make an effort moving forward to remember other book vendors as well as Amazon just because of the perils of eggs in one basket.
But I’m also very inclined to forgive in the technical sense of seeing wrong, or being wronged, but making an affirmative act out of not retaliating for what Occams razor says pretty much had to be a complex to unravel but ultimately simple (and, um, easy to make, though I won’t say how I know except that years ago I caught mine sooner than they caught theirs) error.
I wanna see those Sales Rankings restored though. Soon.
(Via Hortense at Jezebel.)
Submitted by 2851 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-04-13 21:53.
Doesn't address why they are filtering searches by default or creating an adult content ghetto in the first place.
Submitted by 2851 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-04-13 22:16.
I think its reasonable for them to have some filters in place to keep porn from appearing on best seller or front pages of their site. If nothing else I am in favor of keeping Amazon and related sites relatively work safe. Perhaps it would be better for them to have an option for users to turn that filtering off - but given that most users never noticed it before this incident I don't really it as a problem.
Submitted by 2851 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-04-14 02:43.
Well, I'm French and I heard Amazon employees here have pre-traced routes to go to anywhere and are not allowed to talk to their colleagues. I don't know to what point this is true, but I wouldn't be surprised that somebody working in such conditions ends up doing random huge mistakes. At least, *I*'d want to get fired.
[Oh yeah, that sounds familiar. I'm pretty sure they don't treat their knowledge workers that way but that definitely sounds like the way they organize their boxing and shipping centers. The only consolation, and I'm not sure how consoling it is, in the U.S. during winter holiday season they pull almost everyone out of their Seattle headquarters, including executives and programmers, and make them work the lines. So for at least a few weeks everyone gets at least a taste of what it's like to work the floors. I don't know if they do this anywhere else in the world. Thanks, f. --fl]
Submitted by 2851 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-04-14 04:59.
A source: http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lire-le-cote-sombre-d-amazo...
Submitted by 2851 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-04-14 06:28.
This is even more worrisome. I'm trusting my credit card information to a company that either
* Doesn't have a fully-featured testing environment separate from the production environment
* Doesn't have good policies in place to keep employees from testing in production
* Doesn't have good policies in place to ensure adequate testing / review of changes before they go to production
[Hi Monique. I meant their catalog-munching software is effectively a single database. Their card processing would be separate. And way, way, way more mainstream/inflexible. It's probably true their metadata munging procedures didn't have adequate testing and review, although it's also true that a) it hasn't been a problem in the past and b) the safeguards they're going to put in will amount to airport-security sorts of drama that'll tend to reduce flexibility without really increasing security. Thanks. --fl]