Does the Find Quotes feature work?

[Daniel]

The Quotes > Add page advises the user: "Before adding a new quote please first do a search and make sure it doesn't already exist in the database." I had been using the supplied search field to follow that instruction. I assumed that if a short string from the quote I wanted to add produced no results with a quote search, the quote was probably not already on Goodreads. I never thought to test whether the search function actually works.

Recently I tried searching for a quotation I knew to be on Goodreads (because I had added it earlier), and the quote search feature produced no results. So I tried searching for another quotation, and I got the same null result. Meanwhile, searching the Goodreads quote database with an external search engine works fine. Here is an example:

* A quote by Robert M. Sapolsky: "Studies like these are nice validation of my decision as..."

An attempt to search for it on Goodreads:

* Results for "Studies like these are nice validation of my decision as" Showing 0-0 of 0 (0.01 seconds) - Sorry, no results matched your search.

However, the DuckDuckGo search engine finds the quote as the top search result when I search for the string with a site-specific search:

* site:www.goodreads.com/quotes Studies like these are nice validation of my decision as

(Don't be confused by Goodreads automatically and unhelpfully turning part of the search string into a link. Goodreads won't let me link to the actual search URL from here because it's an external site. But you can test the search by pasting the above search string into any search engine that understands the "site:" command.)

I tried searching to see if this is a known problem and I didn't find anything relevant. It's a hard problem to search for since the keywords I tried produce many irrelevant results.

I tried searching on Goodreads for the most popular quote on the site, and that works.

Does anyone know why the search feature sometimes works but not always?

[Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂]

Daniel wrote: "The Quotes > Add page advises the user: "Before adding a new quote please first do a search and make sure it doesn't already exist in the database." I had been using the supplied search field to fo..."
Hi Daniel

This comes under site functionality which volunteer librarians can't help with.

See the first thread on the home page of this group.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

which gives how you can contact Support (Staff) to report. However Search has been erratic for a couple of days. We are still using the former Moderator of this group for rulings for quite a few things & a search of her name brings up nothing.