
Limit my Amazon searches to only books?I have a search box on my Web site that I got from the Amazon Associates program and it's a nice addition to the site, except that I really want people to only have results from their books department, not all across the Amazon system. Is that possible? The Amazon Associates program is one of the unsung heroes of the net, actually, both from the perspective of webmasters who have earned a pretty penny through it and from Amazon itself, who makes a surprisingly large percentage of its gross revenue from Associate sales. I'm a member too. What you're asking involves basically reverse engineering a complex form that Amazon offers in its associates area. Start by having a look at their search with dropdown menu snippet, because that offers the functionality you want, it just doesn't hide the actual category selector. Here's how that form looks: Of course, Amazon's doing this with an iframe, but if you dig into the source itself (try "View Source" on this page, for example), you'll find that there's a block of code that looks like: <select name="index"> <option value="blended">All Products</option> <option value="apparel-index">Apparel & Accessories</option> <option value="baby">Baby</option> <option value="beauty-index">Beauty</option> <option value="books">Books</option> <option value="photo">Camera & Photo</option> etc. etc. That's the key, the variable index. To automatically have books be preselected as the search category, and to hide that selection from the user, simply use: <input type="hidden" name="index" value="books" /> Put that all together and here's a search box that only gives you results in the books category at Amazon.com: <form action="http://www.amazon.com/gp/associates/link-types/searchbox.html" method="get" name="search" target="_top"> <input type="hidden" name="tag" value="davetaylor" /> <input type="hidden" name="mode" value="books" /> Search Amazon for: <input id="keyword" name="keyword" type="text" size="18" /> <input type="submit" value="Go!" /> </form> In use, this minimalist form looks like: That should get you going with your HTML task. Good luck!
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