Regarding Google indexing the site, was that toungue-in-cheek? If not, you may want to consider some basic changes to the structure - I think its less that Google doesn't like your site and more that there's very little there to index.
What about curated author pages? Maybe with some information about the author and a list of his books by publishing date. I know, this may be too close to the Mahalo-model, but it could help with your low number of pages to index. You could start with your top searched authors.
And maybe you could show a little more information about the book when you click on it. I'm not sure what data Amazon provides - there must be more than just the picture, no?
It made the front page of Reddit a while back. My plan was to get traffic organically, but the site is basically one big violation of Google's policies (no original content, it's all search results, etc). The site doesn't even rank for it's own name, although it did for a few days after launch, until Google took notice, and blacklisted it.
I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a bunch of quality content around search results seems difficult (see: Mahalo), but maybe there's another approach I haven't thought of?
1) Show the last 200 searches that people had made (or the most popular for the past day, week, etc.)
2) Instead of directly linking to Amazon upon clicking a book/product, perhaps you should fly out some hidden details for the item (not ajax if feasible).
3) You could also have a "Search by Author" and "Search by Topic" link that is provided when you click a book that provides more results with content.
4) Maybe allow people to create book shelves that they can explain the grouping of a set of books and why they go well together (etc!).
5) One last idea: Provide a list beneath that has a tiny bit more info - as they scroll left/right in the top list, have the bottom scroll up/down to show the range that is visible. This would help with you only linking/showing 20 or so results at a time if you let the list (text) show 100 or more.
To make it indexable you need users to enter in text. Maybe you could have a mini wiki above the search results, where users describe the search they are trying to do or what the search means, or can annotate the search. With your current UI this would be really hard. I feel like the UI is cool on first blush but sort of limits your options as far as experimentation goes.
Just brainstorming here:
- maybe the hook could be: "judge books by their covers"
- the layout is pretty slick but constrains what you can do with the site. Have you considered scrolling down? It could be a differentiator though (your current layout that is).
- When you mouse over a book, have some type of overlay function: star the book, "have you read this book? what did you think?" (leave a comment), share on twitter / facebook (a necessary evil perhaps)
- when you click on a cover, it lightboxes in and has the things listed above
It's basically all user-generated-content, and it actually does rank on Google for a few things, but it's the wrong kind of traffic: People aren't in buying mode, very few visitors actually click through to Amazon and buy something.
I like this site - its cool :) I know its going against the point of the site but you could use the DOM to scrape the Product details and display them as links (you can link to any site without copyright infringement??) - if you don't want text you could always pass a small amount of info into the alt tags. If this sounds dumb feel free to ignore. But I like the idea of the site
Check out Rapidlibrary, they managed to turn a search engine into a top 1000 website. You have to be careful with taking the "creating pages around latest searches" approach, have a look at the latest searches on Rapidlibrary to see what I'm talking about.
Like another commenter pointed out you will need to create static pages for the search engines to find & index. You can do this by creating them automatically from the last x number of searches, if you were able to aggregate some other sources into the engine you could create custom landing pages showing all results rather than people clicking straight off to Amazon & having no dedicated page for each book title.
I think this one is awesome. I hate the teeny tiny pictures in Amazon - it does not compare to seeing books in the store. The downside is I don't really know what to search for. I like to go to a certain section (literature, programming, etc) and browse.
have you looked at http://picclick.com/ .. you have something, i think you're just missing the boat. Picclick has been getting a lot of traction as of late.
To understand... are you expecting Google to enter every possible search term into your search box and index the results? BTW, your site _requires_ javascript = SEO fail.
Regarding Google indexing the site, was that toungue-in-cheek? If not, you may want to consider some basic changes to the structure - I think its less that Google doesn't like your site and more that there's very little there to index.