Searchability In Amazon

As previously mentioned, my recently published debut novel entitled, An Uncertain Faith, was recently picked up by Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. I was understandably excited and wanted to promote this event within my network of family and friends. When they went to search for it by title, however, it didn’t appear in the results. I also conducted the same search with similar results, however searching by author’s name found my novel instantly. I thought surely there must be a mistake somewhere and contacted Amazon’s customer service. I was told that there is more to their search algorithm than merely matching keywords word for word and that even though I was looking up a specific title verbatim the search might return results it thinks I want more and hide the direct match. I would have thought the word for word match would have at least appeared towards the bottom of my search results rather than stripped out altogether. Now I am wondering if there might be a whole world of other products and services I am unaware of just because a computer came to the conclusion that it knows better than me what I want. This is not necessarily a complaint, just an observation, and I was able to search by book by title shortly after my discussion with customer service.

I would like to repost an article on the subject as I do not seem to be the first who learned the hard way that there are ways to optimize searches on platforms other than the big search engines