Gorgeous Amazon Instant Search

showing the book title in text below the image really takes away from the experience.

also on some books you can see the kindle in the background.

search is also a bit buggy...i.e. it performs every search and shows you all the results..which would have been fine if it was truly instant. But it's not, so if you type something out quickly, you'll get a 6 second delay, while it shows all of those search results to you.

oh and results aren't that good...i searched for "technology" and ended up with 4 out of 8 results as "the magic school bus"

There's a trend, particularly in the Apple community, to use "gorgeous" and "beautiful" to describe software which uses full illustrations rather than 'vanilla' UI elements. In accordance with this trend, this "Amazon Instant Search" might be called "gorgeous". But I disagree.

For one, I can't possibly describe it as 'instant': Google's instant search gives me feedback as I type, but here I have to stop typing and wait before I see any change in the search results. Even after I see the search results, it takes another few seconds to load the images (book covers).

The interface is littered with other imperfections: the book titles are truncated, I can't see the user reviews (arguably the most useful part of Amazon), and after I used it for a few minutes the page started flickering between two different sets of search results.

This is a cool tool, and it's fun to play with. But it's not gorgeous.

"That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." (Steve Jobs)