Problem with search books API call

[Kiwidude]

Trying to use the search.xml API and getting very inconsistent results, with books being omitted from the results for a reason I have no idea on?

Here is a specific example book:
Title: A Name To Conjure With
Author: Donald Aamodt

If I search using the Goodreads website search interface, the below query will find me one result as expected:
http://www.goodreads.com/search/searc...

If I try this url using the search.xml API, I get no results :(
http://www.goodreads.com/search/searc...

Or more specifically the header shows a value of 1, but there is no actual search result.

So what is going wrong?

While on the subject of searches - your documentation suggests "boolean operators" but provides no examples. Do I just do q=author+and+title, or do I need to insert %22 for quotes around author/title etc?

Thanks

[Michael]

I'm seeing the same behavior that you are, it seems incorrect.

One of us will look into this shortly.

[Kiwidude]

When you say "shortly"... is that in what sort of timeframe...?

The problem still exists and you haven't fed anything further back here about it?

[Louise]

Kiwidude,

Sorry, but it turns out that search result is from a book we get from Amazon. I added a disclaimer to our search API:

There will be cases where a result is shown on the Goodreads site, but not through the API. This happens when the result is an Amazon-only edition and we have to honor Amazon's terms of service.

We're not allowed to show Amazon-only editions in our search API.

[Kiwidude]

Thanks Louise for clarifying why this occurs.

[Kiwidude]

Just a further question on this. Is it all attributes of that book that you are not allowed to expose through the API or just certain data from it like reviews?

What I am using this API call for is as a way to "link" the book in my application with the Goodreads ID, so that the user can then add it to their shelf. Obviously if the book has an ISBN in my app I can use that API call to get the Goodreads ID. However if the user has not populated it yet or it does not have an ISBN then I use this Goodreads API call to try to find a matching book.

I don't actually want all the reviews data back but this seems to be the only search API call. All we "need" is just for a title/author search to return results of goodreads id, title (+series), authors and in a perfect world a few other data elements like ISBN and published/first published dates. (ISBN to save me doing an additional call afterwards to check if the book has one).

Just enough data for the user to identify the book as a match so that they are then able to use that goodreads id to view the book on your site, add it to their shelves etc.

Is any of that possible? If the Amazon data still can't come through that, is there still any chance of adding a similar API call for the data you can expose from other providers? It would reduce the traffic of the reviews data we don't want, and putting ISBN in particular would reduce the additional calls we need to make after a search.

Many thanks.

[Michael]

I think amazon doesn't allow us to even show title and author name. We might be able to return just the book id (and maybe the ISBN), if thats valuable...


It's pretty crappy.