'Tis the season...

But some merchants haven't quite caught on to the whole potential of the web yet.

Take Barnes & Noble (whom I use a lot because it's a pain for me to get to the post office and B&N uses UPS, whose drivers will leave packages at the rental office here, unlike the mail carriers). I searched DVDs for a present for a friend - I wanted an Arabic-language movie. To start with, the only option for searching on "International" movies is by place - so I had to search through the whole "Middle East". And as you can easily guess - if you know movies - Iranian and Israeli films way predominated (including something called 'war classics', some spaghetti westerns and those Golan-Globus fairy tales). But I did find something for her - and found something I wanted for myself as well. However, B&N does not give us the option of splitting an order and shipping it to two different places - that can't be that hard! Other online merchants do it - so I had to remove that DVD and place a second order.

And here's the really bizarre thing. It's an Iranian movie called Ayneh or, in English "The Mirror". But "The Mirror" is how it comes up in their list, and in the shopping cart and the order list. By the time I'd finished with the first order, I'd forgotten "Ayneh", so I searched their DVD titles for "The Mirror".

It did not come up - 55 other movies, NONE named "The Mirror" came up, but not that one.

Which meant I had to do the whole original search (Middle East) over again to find the thing - page 11 of a 21 page search, by the way.

They really need to make their DVD search perform better.