Goodreads search engine

[Sabrina]

Does anyone else have a problem or I guess just general frustration about goodreads search engine? As time goes by I am more and more annoyed with the results or lack thereof from my searches. I put in a title and if it isn't one of the first 5 to come up you can hit the spyglass for more options. The only problem is those options are nowhere near what title you put in even with the title button selected. I'm guessing they are giving you the books by popularity rather than title which is what it should do.

Example: I searched for The Abandoned by Douglas Clegg

Results in order for that search:
The Abandoned (Graveyard Queen #0.5) by Amanda Stevens
Wedding of the Season (Abandoned at the Altar, #1) by Laura Lee Guhrke
Scandal of the Year (Abandoned at the Altar, #2) by Laura Lee Guhrke
Trouble at the Wedding (Abandoned at the Altar, #3) by Laura Lee Guhrke
Mandie and the Abandoned Mine (Mandie, #8) by Lois Gladys Leppard
Garden of the Lost and Abandoned: The Extraordinary Story of One Ordinary Woman and the Children She Saves by Jessica Yu
Forever (The Abandoned, #1) by Eric Marier
The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too by James K. Galbraith
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko
Lost & Found (The Abandoned #1) by E.B. Brooks
The Case of the Abandoned Aussie (A Thousand Islands Doggy Inn Mystery, #1) by B.R. Snow
ETC.

The book I was looking for was on page 3. You can see why this bothers me. Does this bother anyone else? Does anyone know why goodreads search engine is like this and not like any other book search engine that actually gives you what you are looking for when you put in a title? Tip for better searching?

[Kandice]

I may be guessing and wrong, but I think this has gotten worse since Amazon acquired GR, and my personal thought was that Amazon was manipulating the searches to push titles they want to sell to the top.

Is that too conspiracy theorist? O_o

[Faith]

The best way to search is by ISBN/ASIN. Second best is by title plus first and/or last name of the author.

[Sabrina]

I have tried ISBN/ASIN on some older books I had and wanted to look up and half the time they couldn't be found that way.

[Kandice]

Faith wrote: "The best way to search is by ISBN/ASIN. Second best is by title plus first and/or last name of the author."

Usually when I am searching for a book I don't have the actual book, so don't have that.

[Maria]

It started happening to me too I just type title and first letters of authors name and presto it is there. Sometimes you want a quick search and do not have the ISBN or ASIN handy

[David]

I have to agree. They need to narrow their search parameters to give more accurate results.

When I'm looking for a book titled 'The Awakening' (say), that's the only title I want to see, not every book every published with any form of 'Awakening' in the title.

Ditto when I type in Michael Connelly, I'm only interested in books by him, not a list of every book ever written by anyone with the name Michael or Connelly.

[Thomas]

I sometimes use quote marks and it seems to help.

[P.K.]

A search engine isn't human. It can only react to certain words, not their meaning. That is the problem the social media sites have with trying to censor unwanted posts. If you don't know the author of a book or its ISBN (old books won't have one) then you will have to endure many other entities with the same words in them as the title you are seeking. Let us be grateful we can do this sitting comfortably at home and not having to trudge down to a reference library as we used to .

[Janet , Moderator]

Haha PK!! That's true!

[Paris (kerbytejas)]

Sabrina wrote: "Does anyone else have a problem or I guess just general frustration about goodreads search engine? As time goes by I am more and more annoyed with the results or lack thereof from my searches. I pu..."

I just did your search The Abandoned by Douglas Clegg - and it was the top option.....
maybe it depends on the mood of the search engine... lol

[Brenda]

It’s also important that your search terms are spelled correctly!

[Janet , Moderator]

Yes, even down to the punctuation, abbreviations etc.

[Sabrina]

Paris (kerbytejas) wrote: "Sabrina wrote: "Does anyone else have a problem or I guess just general frustration about goodreads search engine? As time goes by I am more and more annoyed with the results or lack thereof from m..."

Did you put in the title and author? If you only have a title and forgot the author or remember what the cover looked like you will have a hard time. I used the author's name in my example but I only had the title originally, so the search engine sucks because I got 2 pages of random stuff before I got to the single title that should have come up on page 1.

[Barbara]

I am going to be Captain Cranky here because there is a book I've been trying to search so I can put up a review. It came out a few weeks ago, and it up on all the online "book" sites - I was even able to review it on Barnes and Noble - but when I put the title in the search engine, it doesn't come up and when I try to ask about it all I get is that I should join the Librarians Group and then ask them to put it up.
It's new fiction, not old or obscure or self published. Must be pretty frustrating for authors in this situation.