From my poking at the engine I am not seeing this level of improvement... at least from an end-user perspective

Here is some unscientific poking:

XBox 360 (10 out of 18 have images)

iPod (12 out of 18)

kershaw shun (a brand of knife) (0 out of 18).

This leads to my overall rating of approximately 41%.

I could see a small discrepancy because of the small sample size, but this is pretty huge.  Running the same queries on Google Product Search yields an average of 90%...

Surely webmasters blocking bots can't be the main reason here...

Can you explain why there is such a difference between the user experience and the reported 88.6% images?  What categories have good coverage?

Jeff, you make a good observation.  We've verified your queries and all the offers without images are from Product Upload Beta feeds where the merchant has blocked our image bot.  In terms of the categories that have more images, this is heavily skewed by what merchants are uploading.

Additionally, I think the big difference between our numbers is due to two reasons.  Part of it is because of sample size.  The other cause is that we're getting more feeds over time, exacerbating the problem.

As you can imagine, we are actively working to address the image issue with feeds in coordination with merchants.

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