A power search is used to retrieve book information using a complex query. You can use the power search to send Amazon.com complex descriptions of books you are looking for. The syntax for a power search is shown below:

• author: ambrose
• author: ambrose and binding: (abridged or large print) and pubdate: after 11-1996
• subject: history and (spain or mexico) and not military and language: spanish
• (subject: marketing and author: kotler) or (publisher: harper and subject: "high technology")
• keywords: "high tech" and not fiction and pubdate: during 1999
• isbn: 0446394319 or 0306806819 or 1567993850

You can use the following properties of a book in your search:

• Title
• Subject
• Author
• Keyword
• ISBN
• Publisher
• Language
• Publication date (pubdate)

You can use the words and, or, and not to link different parts of a book description. You can also group properties together using parentheses if that seems necessary to convey the precise meaning of your description.

Please note:  Because power searches can only be used on book-related searches on the Amazon site, power search results will only return book-related searches in XML.

Matching Against Product Fields

Power Search allows searching against a variety of fields. You can use any combination of the following keywords to match against specific product fields:

• asin:
• author:
• author-exact:
• author-begins:
• keywords:
• keywords-begin:
• language:
• publisher:
• subject:
• subject-words-begin:
• subject-begins:
• title:
• title-words-begin:
• title-begins:

You can combine them with and, or, and not, and you can group them with parentheses.

Here are two simple examples.

Find the French versions of the Michelin travel guides:

http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml2?dev-t=D2ED5GR7A6RZ7Y&t=YOURID&PowerSearch=language:french%20and%20keywords:travel%20and%20title-begins:Michelin&page=1&mode=books&type=lite&f=xml

Find the English versions of those same travel guides:

http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml2?dev-t=D2ED5GR7A6RZ7Y&t=YOURID&PowerSearch=language:english%20and%20keywords:travel%20and%20title-begins:Michelin&page=1&mode=books&type=lite&f=xml

Power Searches via XML

Call and Response

Please note:  Space characters must be represented in "URL encoded" form where the spaces are replaced with the three character sequence "%20".

Here is a sample URL:

http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml?v=1.0&PowerSearch=author:Stephen%20King%20and%20pubdate:2003&mode=books&dev-t=[developer’s token goes here]&t=test&type=lite&f=xml

Queries can include parentheses for grouping, and the and, or, and not operators.

Examples

http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?PowerSearch=author:Knuth&mode=books&dev-t=[developer’s token goes here]&t=webservices-20&type=lite&f=xml

http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?PowerSearch=author:Knuth%20and%20subject:Art&mode=books&dev-t=webservices-20&t=[developer’s token goes here]&type=lite&f=xml

http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?PowerSearch=author:Stephen%20King%20and%20pubdate:2003&mode=books&dev-t=[developer’s token goes here]&t=webservices-20&type=lite&f=xml

Power Searches via SOAP

This section shows how to create a request for power searches via SOAP.  This request will return a SOAP object containing the Lite or the Heavy form of the data.

Call and Response