Normally Amazon shows you suggestions as you type characters in the search box. For example if you type “Christian m” you will see a list of suggestions including “Christian marriage”. You don’t have to type the full search, just select from the suggestions.

If you try this same search by typing “gay m” you get nothing. Unlike the term “Christian”, the word “gay” just shuts off the search suggestions feature completely. Same for “lesbian.”

I wonder what kind of “glitch” this can be attributed to.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. …it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories…. …and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.—Drew Herdener, Amazon spokesperson

Classic, just classic. How many times have I heard the Business uttering such innuendos. Dollars to doughnuts they approved the change before they actually thought through the consequences.

Ok, Ok, I know, the cynic IT type in me. But you have to wonder how 57,310 rows (or their interpretations) got messed up without the Business making some kind of request they signed off on. A single naïve user trusting a system to protect him or her from themselves? I could believe that.

Can you say “process error”?

I knew you could.

The fact that it may have been a glitch or sabotage does not excuse or even explain the initial response, “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material,” by Ashlyn D., unless that response, too, was part of the glitch. —buster

I charged that to misunderstanding the question, which was just as likely. A more nuanced response was probably missed because a standard response was given to what was perceived as a question about the handling of material classified as “adult” Vs. material that mentions LGBT interests or literature that is otherwise not of an “Adult” nature. Very likely another case of an automated (or semi-automated) response based on key-words, or simple mindedness, or plain haste on the part of a support person in a high-volume production environment.

It’s not unlikely that this has been a known problem for a while and everybody in the food-chain at Amazon is just waiting for IT to fix the problem (or close whatever vulnerability might exist) and clean up the mess.

tehdely breaks it down, and also explains Bantown – a process by which two groups are brought into opposition by a third party.
http://tehdely.livejournal.com/88823.html

It could have been a case of employee sabotage – some homophobic staff person making a change to a query in the databases or other code, or manually changing data for GLBTQ material, quietly getting away with it until now. —Not that David

Yeah, but take the conspirator(s) out of this, and what’s left behind is a very likely scenario: somebody created a query that was just a little too broad and updated all the results with some new classification. What might thus possibly have been updated correctly were the query correct must now be undone by a painful manual process or special application that must be written, tested, and run precisely once to fix the data (quite possibly affecting millions of rows in a database), all on a 7/24/365 system. The fix could become much more complex if all the sales and ranking data had to be repaired, too.

I’m glad I don’t have to fix something that follows this outline under the glare of management, customer, and stock-holder attention.

Remember that we are all still just speculating here. Conspiracy theories aside, I’ll ascribe this to a code maintenance or process error.

Or something like that.

So, I just did a search in amazon for two things: “Unfriendly Fire” and “Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star“. Unfriendly Fire was pretty easy to find, came up in search results, but wasn’t the top search result unless I put the title in quotes. I see nothing in the “Unfriendly Fire” product page that marks it as adult, and it currently has an
“Amazon.com Sales Rank: #11,853 in Books”

For “Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star” there was a trick to it.
When searching under “All Departments” for the exact words “Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star” (with or without quotes), it didn’t find it, but found products that had some of the words in the title. However when I changed the search criteria from “All Departments” to “Books”, (with or without quotes) it finds the book immediately. It also has nothing to denote it being adult material on the product page and has an “Amazon.com Sales Rank: #63,164 in Books”
Using an “All Departments” search with no quotations around the title – Ron Jeremy’s book came up as first on the list in a title search, and Jenna Jameson’s book was 3rd in a title search.

Now, it’s possible since Amazon’s cookie logged me in (it says “Hello Jason!” at the top) it knows that I’m over 18 and thus didn’t do any filtering, if Amazon does filter for non-signed in customers and or minors.

I then signed out and just looked for Blue Blake’s book, and had the same trouble as when Amazon recognized me, didn’t show up in “All Departments”, but did show up in “Books”, nothing on the page to suggest/state that it’s classified as adult by Amazon, but it did now have an “Amazon.com Sales Rank: #75,552 in books” which is a larger number. Somehow I doubt that $12,388 copies were sold in the 5 minutes it took me to do my little experiment.

Seems like something is wacky at Amazon, but I’m not sure it’s cause for alarm. It’s also entirely possible that I don’t fully understand the situation.