Amazon betterizer

Not really a book, but connected to books, and it really annoyed me.  The amazon betterizer is as stupid as its name (what did they do, have a contest for stupidest name?).

It's got to be the worst book recommendation thing I've seen in 5 years.

1. Its only levels are "like" and nothing. You can mark a book as not interested, but that doesn't stop 10 other books like it from coming up. (I tried this -- after I marked "Going Rogue," some book by Mark Levin, and "The Patriot's Guide to History" as not interested, I gave up).

2. Related to 1 -- I actually have ratings on something over 500 books that I've put in over the years. The "Betterizer" ignores them. Instead, it wants to know if I "like" the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, the Julia Child guide to cooking, and the aforementioned "Going Rogue."

 3.  The way it works is, it shows you some items, and if you don't want to "like" of them, you hit refresh, so it gives you different items. I went back to the page to try again, and it started over from the beginning. I hit "refresh", and it gave me the same books as the last time I hit refresh (it changes the books, but it gives you the same choices as before). Since I'd hit refresh 3 times before, I had to refresh 4 times to see new books.

Netflix already showed everyone how to do this right. Instead of recommending 10 cookbooks, ask me if I like cookbooks. Instead of recommending me 10 books by conservative luminaries, ask me if I read political books.

It feels like something a few interns cooked up, but its hard to imagine this thing went through even one day of usability testing.

Since I'm complaining, anyway, I'll mention that amazon's categorization needs major work.  When I go to recommendation for "fiction and literature," why is Learning Greek Through Plato the second recommendation?  For that matter, why does Plato's Republic top foreign language fiction?