Power-Search for Books
Fine-tune your book searches with the Advanced Search form and Power Search queries.
The search form on the lefthand side of the Amazon home page is the most widely used way to find items. A couple of keywords can get you surprisingly close to what you’re looking for. But if you’d like to do more sophisticated searches, you’ll have to use the Advanced Search form or learn Amazon’s Power Search syntax.
Advanced Search
Amazon offers an Advanced Book Search form on their web site at http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ats-query-page. This form allows you to search for a specific title, author, subject, ISBN, or publisher. And you can narrow your search by format, reader age, language, or publication date.
The query in Figure 1-15 will return all books by O’Reilly with the word “Mac” in the title.

Figure 1-15. Amazon Advanced Search page
Power Search
Beyond
Advanced Search, there’s a way to perform
even more finely tuned searches of the product database: Power
Search. A Power Search uses a special query syntax to define what
you’re looking for. The syntax consists of field/value pairs that are
put together with connecting words like “or” or “and.” To perform the
same query, we’d include the publisher and
title fields with the appropriate values:
publisher:O'Reilly and title:Mac
To run the search, paste this into the Power Search form at the bottom of the Advanced Search page ...