Innovative Search From Amazon

Sometimes I stumble on good new UI experiments and every once in a while I like it so much, I take some time to write about them.  This one is from Amazon and as far as I can tell it has been rolled out across all their services (.com/.de/.co.uk ). What it does is, it guesses in which category the item you are searching for might fall. In my case I was searching for Bill Buxton. It guessed that  what I was looking for was found in the Books section. That in itself is not terribly useful since I am mostly likely to be looking for Bill Buxton’s books and not his movies, seeing as he is only an author and not a movie producer too (yet?) and I will most probably get books only anyway.

However, it gets a lot more useful when searching for stuff that is found in different sorts of categories. A good example of that would be Donald Duck. Below you’ll see that Amazon filters your query automatically into the different categories.

My only qualms with it is, is that it is not directly distinguishable from search results, apart from the fact that it was indented. Perhaps colour could take care of that.