Search sucks, sucks, sucks. I defy anyone to show how to find this book by title or author:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61323...

Well, I won't disagree that the search engine sucks, but if you search

stories in stone david b. williams

it comes right up.

I also found it on the first page of results using "stories stone williams," "stone david williams," and "stories david williams."

The search wasn't quite as good using just two words, though, such as "stories stone," "stone williams," and "stories williams." I didn't look past the first page of results.

The search engine is abominable. On several occasions, I've had better luck using Google's site search feature than with the GR search engine.

Cyn wrote: "The search engine is abominable. On several occasions, I've had better luck using Google's site search feature than with the GR search engine."

Keep in mind Google is a company with 20 thousand employees that makes 21 billion dollars a year doing mostly search.

We have 7 employees, only 2 of which are totally full-time.

Practical examples of search strings that fail would be much more helpful!

Ok - for this search, I keep specifying that I want to search GR and it goes to Amazon anyway. It should just show me books with titles containing "A is for" but I'm getting just about any title with "is for" in it as well as plenty of titles that are completely unrelated, such as "Vindication" (only one edition, so that isn't because of a variant title somewhere).

Cyn wrote: "it goes to Amazon anyway"

It does that when it can't find anything on GR. Why it can't is another question.

why's the search "book: ..."

apparently searching "book: blah" doesn't work

Yeah, but it doesn't work when corrected to "titles: ..." either.

As an everything search "a is for" brings up all sorts of nonsense, but nothing helpful on the first few pages of results. "a is for" + "sue" brings up the target book as result #4, though.

That wasn't actually my "target" book. I was looking for a children's book that I had edited, but I couldn't remember the title any more specifically than that. The titles I did find told me what I wanted to know - that if a title is, for instance, A is for Alibi, the "A" gets moved for the sort order field even though it isn't an article in this instance. If you changed the title to "A" is for Alibi, it would sort properly - but going through all 40+ editions of that book would take a while. I'll just remember that for the future.

Cyn wrote: "If you changed the title to "A" is for Alibi, it would sort properly"

It would? Are you sure it's not sorting on " instead of on A?

(You can manually change the sort title so that it starts with A -- the trick is that you can't do it at the same time as changing the display title, because it'll override the sort title, but if the only thing you're changing is the sort title it'll stick.)

It could be sorting on " - but that's seldom much of a problem. It is a nuisance to have it sorting on "is" (to me, at least). I tried changing the sort title, all by itself, and it kept reverting to putting the "a" at the end.

That's secondary to the search engine problem, though.

I just searched for "hungry monkey", and the first three books on the list had neither word in their titles.

Is it using the space between the words as a search term or something? Why should a book whose title begins with "hungry monkey" come in behind books that don't have either search term?

I'm beginning to think there is a bug, as I'm noticing more and more books ranking for queries that they don't contain. Frustrating... Re-indexing everything again to see if it helps..

edit: some of it is that I added book descriptions to the index. But it didn't work how I hoped, so I'm removing them.

I could see a book description search being useful ("what was that book about the monkey who went to the moon?"), but it should be a special search, not the default, and certainly not part of a search that is labeled "title, author, or ISBN".

My "Hungry Monkey" book has now moved up to second in the search, but I'm still wondering about the first (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27020...), whose only claim to search relevance is to have the word "hungry" appear toward the bottom of the book description.

Stories in Stone still doesn't appear in the first three pages of results for a search for "stories in stone", though it is near the bottom of the first page for [titles:stories titles:stone]. But it shouldn't be at the bottom of the page. And the first nine results on that page have neither word in their titles.

I just searched for "anna karenina" and "war and peace" + Tolstoy, and while for AK it at least gave a partially relevant match as the first result (though not for the one I would expect to see first), war and peace cannot be found using the search, and actually gives idiotically unrelated search results, unless I enter an ISBN.

I just searched for Single with Benefits. Couldn't remember the author's name. 45 results came up, not one single book had that title. I searched with the Amazon option. 6 books came up, three with that title (one was a duplicate edition). This seems to be happening continually, at least for me for the books I searched for the last few days, that results on Goodreads are almost always irrelevant to the search but hit the Amazon button and the right ones come up.

I am sure its not really but it does feel like its more of the Amazon thing detailed on the GR blog (http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/178.N...) so not only do all the 'find at' links go only to Amazon, but we must search through there in the first place to get meaningful results.

Search seems to be improving.

Hungry Monkey has now moved up to the top of the "hungry monkey" search. Whee!!

Stories in Stone is now midway down the first page if I search for "stories in stone" with quotes around the whole phrase. Which is better, but it should still come out ahead of The Story of the Stone.

The search engine for trivia questions doesn't seem to be working well either.
For example, last week or so I searched for "Harry Potter," and about 95 pages of results showed up. Today when I searched for the same thing only 5 pages resulted.
When I searched for a few other books, there were no results at all.

Heather wrote: "Search seems to be improving..."

I'm finding the opposite. I searched for Charlie Hits it Big. And got one result.

1 of 1 results for 'charlie hits it big' (Goodreads search in 0.12s)
Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography

So I hit the Amazon button and got this:
showing 1-3 of 3 results (different editions, same book ) for 'charlie hits it big' (Amazon.com search in 0.61s)
Charlie Hits It Big
by Deborah Blumenthal (Goodreads author), Denise Brunkus (Illustrator)
avg rating 3.73 — 15 ratings — published 2008

There is only one book with that title and its by a Goodreads author and Goodreads search engine can't pull it up is not good at all.

Hmm. I tried the same search, Petra, and got the right book -- but also two uncombined editions of it (which I've combined now) that were probably pulled in from Amazon when you did your Amazon search. It makes an odd sort of sense that importing a new edition would cause some re-indexing that would change the search results, and it's probably part of what's making this such a difficult bug to track down....

We are working on the search index, sorry for all the issues. Things may get worse before they get better.

i had a hard time trying to find Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

the cover of the book only states Rant, and I checked chuck p's book list and it wasn't listed there either....finally i put in the isbn # (or whatever its called) and then it popped up....

now i see its on chuck p's page as well...weird

MICHAEL wrote: "We are working on the search index, sorry for all the issues. Things may get worse before they get better."

Thanks, MICHAEL! *bracing self for the turbulence*

Cait wrote: "Hmm. I tried the same search, Petra, and got the right book -- but also two uncombined editions of it (which I've combined now) that were probably pulled in from Amazon when you did your Amazon se..."

I do appreciate that Michael wrote the search engine is being worked on, but still I wanted to bring something up because its something specific and bringing it to light may help with sorting it out. If you guys knew about this all the time, sorry.

I searched for When Daddy Comes Home and got 7 results, none of them the right one. So I hit Amazon and got 13 results, the first one was the right one. But here's what's odd: the book has 18 ratings and 7 reviews on Goodreads, but only the Amazon search engine can find it. That is weird.

Re search: In some thread MICHAEL said it was going to get worse before it got better, and I got the feeling he meant over the coming days, not just that day.

correct :)

I am not sure how to specify my report, but I only receive one book result when I search for the author Nigel Tomm. All of his other books and information and whatnot appear when I click to view his author profile, but the general search itself has been strange; results are either absent of being displayed or they are displayed in very out-of-whack orders.

Matt: I too have been experiencing this. I'll search an author's name, find one or two books listed, click on the author link, and see 25 titles. But, as Lisa said, it looks like this won't be completely fixed for a while yet...