I was looking for Batgirl Vol. 1: Silent Running.

Here are things which, entered into the search engine, do not return this book anywhere at all in the search results:
"silent running"
"batgirl"
"batgirl vol"
"silent 1"
"running 1"

However, it's not completely unsearchable. Here are search terms which do return this book:
"batgirl silent running"
"batgirl 1"
"batgirl vol 1"

The title was changed to alter its punctuation ("Batgirl, Vol 1: Silent Running" to "Batgirl Vol. 1: Silent Running") five days ago, but has otherwise existed with all of these words in the title for over a year.

Yeah. The search engine seems to fail fairly dramatically at times. I think they need to completely rebuild the cache more regularly (monthly?) because the automatic updating doesn't always work well. If you do author specific searches, you can find tons of mismatches with author names that were cleaned up months ago still turning up despite not having any of the keywords.

They may have just updated the cache. Over 100 pages of false results I've been getting for months are now gone.

It would also explain some of the extra oddness people have been getting for the last few days.

Cool!

Oh, That's wonderful.

Unfortunately, I'm still seeing the same results as with my original report. :(

Cait, I checked last night and a search for "silent running" did turn up the book (it was about #3 on the list). When I search now, it's not turning up. Strange.

Actually, this is very very weird.

* Search for "silent running" = 10 results, none of which are the batgirl book

* Change to search "authors" (don't ask why) = 1 result, titled "Silent Running" by Paul Norman; does not actually match correct author search

* Change to search "titles" = 0 results; there are many books with this title

* Change to search "all" = 41 results, the second of which *is* the batgirl book

The last one is apparently searching amazon rather than GoodReads.

It appears to be failing to find it on a GoodReads search, but does find it in an Amazon search, even though the book is already in the GR database.

Huh, you're right, Michael! Although the amazon.com search turns of "7 of 41" results for me: four of the results are also returned by the GR search and three are not.

We did rebuild the search index last weekend. Looks like that title is showing up now, but let me know if there are others that aren't working. You can force a re-index of any book by editing it and clicking on save (even if you change nothing).

Thanks, Otis! I'll keep my eyes open....

The search engine is still behaving very weirdly. I have just finished reading Kangaroo Dreaming. I searched for it on the search engine and got only one result: The Kangaroo Factor. I changed the search option to Amazon and got no results at all! So I went to Amazon directly and got the right book as the first result.

Then I remembered I had actually put Kangaroo Dreaming on my currently-reading shelf (I don't usually update this shelf). So the book was on Goodreads, but didn't show up in any search results. Very weird.

They had this problem, maybe six months ago, where a lot of books in the DB weren't being found in fairly basic searches. I wonder if this has come back.

This should be fixed now.

As of the wee hours of May 14, when I searched for a particular set of King Arthur tales, I could only find 4 of them on GR. When I pulled them up in Amazon and used my little "Add to GoodReads" button, though, they were all on GR after all (which I had suspected).

I was actually coming to report another oddity, though. When I restrict my search options to "title" and search on "glitter train" the search engine comes back with this in the search box: titles:"glitter titles:train"

I tried again, with
titles:"glitter train"
and got the
titles:"glitter titles:train"
again.

Should we not try searching on phrases at all?

Finally, I was just going through all 51 "Glitter Train" magazines that are in the system, "not a book"ing them. I reloaded my search and suddenly the engine claims there are absolutely NO items with that phrase in them. I can pull up the ones I already worked on from my editing log, but can't get to the others that still need work.
Examples:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64045...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21563...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55679...

Thanks,
Cyn

Can you provide a concrete example? I think you might have been misseplling "glimmer" as "glitter"

http://www.goodreads.com/search/search?s...

(I think the system maintenance window ate my first response.)

That's embarrassing. You're absolutely right about the glimmer train stuff.

The weirdness with the search syntax is correct, though. And I really was searching on the correct names for the King Arthur books (which did come up correctly on a search last evening, happily), but they just wouldn't show up.

Thanks,
Cyn

I am repeatedly getting very odd (and often useless) results for searches. For example, today I searched for 'The Pearl' and got back in results books such as Anne Frank:Diary of a Young Girl, The Old Man and the Sea, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Winnie-the-Pooh. It also turned up Steinbeck's The Pearl, Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, and Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring. These were all first page results, with Anne Frank and Hemingway first on the list.

At least at first blush, many of these results seem, if not downright confusing, at least a little odd.

usually its because they have a title like this: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26644...

Be sure to keep sending in examples of bad searches! The more data we have, the easier it is to fix this kind of thing.

Thank MICHAEL, that makes sense. It doesn't make the search easier, but it makes sense :)

I found the particular book I wanted about page 8 or so (out of 169 pages).

Sometimes clicking the amazon radio helps, specifying the author _really_ helps.

I usually do when I know. I was just really surprised to find some of the books lining up as they did -- apt to making a girl think "pearl" is really spelled some other way!

MICHAEL wrote: "usually its because they have a title like this: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2664496.The_Diary_of_Anne_Frank"

Fixed.

My Amazon radio button keeps changing to amazon.jp, which isn't very useful for an English-monolingual person who largely works with books from the western world. Does that happen to others? I don't think I've ever deliberately requested amazon.jp, just amazon.com.

It only happens when a search has been unsuccessful, I think.

Michael,

I had mentioned in a different thread a couple of weeks ago that I've also noticed some wonkiness with the search results. Like Sherri, I have noticed the system kicking up results that don't appear to have a rhyme or reason (at least, not to me).

For example, as I mentioned in the other thread, when searching for the book John Adams the search engine kicks up:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Odyssey by Homer
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Othello by William Shakespeare
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

then, John Adams by David McCullough.

I kind of understand Douglas Adams showing up in the results because his last name matches, but I don't really understand any of the other results listed...unless there is possibly an Adams or a John listed as a contributor on one of the editions perhaps?? Still, very odd results.

Typically, I search for a book by title and author listed in the search engine box, but when you only know the title, the results that are kicked up can be a tad confusing...if not, frustrating. I wonder if a search engine that is similar to what libraries have would be possible? Where you have a drop-down menu for the search and can select from 'Title Starts With', 'Title Keyword', 'Author Starts With', 'Author Keyword', 'ISBN', etc.?

Anyway, keep up the good work, Michael! We appreciate you working on/fixing these issues! :-)

That's a thought -- maybe the simple search needs an option for an 'advanced search' where title and author name are separate fields? Or with a choice about the language/country of the edition selected? Since Goodreads is, essentially, listing nearly every book that is currently available, a simple search is bound to turn up dozens of less accurate results. Sometimes even having the author name doesn't reduce the number of results.

As an example, Huck Finn comes up because there's an edition with an Adam and an edition with a John.

Switching the search to a by-title search (click on "more options" under the search box) brings up McCullough's book as the first option.

ah, ok.

You know, in a year of being here, I've never actually clicked 'more options' on a search? Always a button to press!

Still, I wouldn't mind a very customizable search for when I'm hunting down books about which I don't have much information, so I can at least reduce the number of returns by sorting out various editions, other languages, etc.

Thanks once again, Rivka! Always more to learn with GR. The 'more options' link does certainly help with the search results! :-)

Sherri wrote: "You know, in a year of being here, I've never actually clicked 'more options' on a search?"

I'm not sure, but I think that was only introduced about 6 months ago.


Sherri wrote: "Always a button to press!"

Not THAT button!

Are there still bugs in the system?

for instance, I typed in "Peace or partition habsburg" (using both 'all' and 'title') as I was trying to get

Fest, Wilfried. Peace or partition: the Habsburg monarchy and British policy, 1914-1918.
London: G. Prior, 1978.

because I wanted to add it to a shelf for a group that I moderate.

It came up blank both times. but when I went over to Amazon.com to get the ISBN, and then just put that instead, it came up right away.

This is just one example of the problem I have been having constantly. (Generally, as soon as I pull the ISBN from another database, it pops up, but if I put in the title, or significant portion of the title, it fails to appear). While sometimes I may have made a spelling error, it is happening enough that I don't think it's just my bad typing -- unless I am doing the searches incorrectly.

Any suggestions?

Works now, maybe the book was not in our system yet?

When you do a search if it doesn't find anything it will try and search amazon, and import all the results it finds there. Why the amazon search on that string doesn't pull up any results i'm unclear on.

MICHAEL wrote: "Why the amazon search on that string doesn't pull up any results i'm unclear on."

Actually, I've been having a lot of problems with GR's search-on-Amazon function in the past week or two. ISBNs work consistently, but nothing else does.

We changed that recently because they have a new book search api, we will investigate this right now.

Rivka: do you have any more examples?

Yes.

Stieg Larsson
Callie's Rules
God, Actually

All of these work fine using GR's search, but if I choose the Amazon radio button, yield no results. (But they do when I actually search on Amazon.)

Ben fixed it, should be back to normal now.

More problems:

License Invoked

does not show up in a search, even though it's been int he DB for a long time.

I does if you search by ISBN. But not title. Weird.

I've searched for 4 different books by ISBN this morning and none of them have come up. I added a few manually, but now I'm wondering if something is broken. This is one I've searched for, can't find, and have not added:

9780641901232

And another:

9781615588343

These are pretty common books. I'm getting the ISBNs from B&N's bargain book sale.

JG, are you sure that that ISBN is correct? I see very few hits for it anywhere -- the only credible one seems to be Barnes&Noble's remainders bin.

Edited to add: Maybe B&N has a set of "extra" ISBNs it keeps for its sales? That seems...profligate. But it would explain this.

All I know is that they're on B&N. They aren't books I own. I didn't search for them anywhere else, thinking that B&N usually knows what they're doing. Weird. So should I add the ones I see or leave them alone?

We don't import from b&n, looks like 9780641901232 isn't on amazon. but you can still add it manually.

License invoked could be an amazon problem, but we'll take a look at it.

Why should it be an Amazon problem if it's in the GR database already? Shouldn't it start by searching GR?

oh, when i searched for it it did come up, just not for an amazon search, I'm guessing it didn't for you? Hmmmmm...

MICHAEL wrote: "I'm guessing it didn't for you? Hmmmmm..."

Or for me. But it does now.

Last night I did save the book without making changes, and it didn't help then. But maybe it did when the cache reset overnight? Or something like that?

[EDIT: Because "rest" and "reset" are not the same thing.]

i think if someone edited the book, it would try and re add it to the search. or if someone did an amazon search, found another edition, and then merged them?

When I originally reported this I very explicitly made sure it was a GoodReads search and it came up blank. I didn't do the edit trick because I didn't want to instantly fix it, but rather point out that the book had mysteriously been dropped from the search cache, which seems to be happening much more frequently lately.

keep the reports coming in!