Thursday, June 18, 2009

Looking for a Good Tennis Book

I'm looking for a book on tennis. I go to Amazon, the subject index gets me down to 1000+ books sorted by something called "relevance." The books don't look interesting and I'm not going to scan 1000+ books for one that is. What should I do? I switch the sorting method to "Avg. Customer Review" but this gives me a ton of five star ratings by a single person. So, if I am the same as this other person then maybe this is a good book for me. I don't want to try to find my tennis doppelganger. I'm wishing that Amazon had New Egg's "most customer reviews" - definitely dangerous because someone could game the system but it eliminates most of the one review wonders. I go to Google Books but it is hopeless. I use Google and search for the "best tennis books" but the results are not helpful. I try the new Microsoft search ... after I try www.ding.com, which is not really the correct name. What was it? Oh yea, Bing (actually, I used Google search and asked for "Microsoft Search"). I got pretty much the same junk that Google gave me.

Perhaps the web has no suggestions about good tennis books - I kind of doubt that. The real problem is that search really does not understand what I am asking - there is no semantic anything that might suggest that I am looking for a good tennis player's opinion of tennis books. It does not need to be the best tennis player, it does not need to be someone famous, etc.

I came up with an aphorism for this problem:

With context, Artificial Intelligence is easy

How to infer context, then, would seem to be the "fundamental problem of artificial intelligence." I have no particular insight as to how to crack this problem but until it is done I will be looking for good tennis books by linearly scanning all of the books Amazon has to offer.

2 comments:

  1. The Inner Game of Tennis?

    Here's what works best for me on Amazon. Start with any tennis book. Use the personalization features to browse around; specifically "Customers who bought this also bought", but the others are useful too.

    You end up finding the most popular books in a genre and can easily tell what has a lot of reviews that are high rated.

    YMMV.

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  2. It is like you are trying to find your doppelganger. That is not a bad strategy! In some respects one would like the UI to guide you in this experience.

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