Support for faceted search?

[Patrick]

Why is there no support for faceted search? E.g., to get the shelf counts for a given set of query results, and then to combine shelves to refine a query.

As a user, I would like to be able to see the shelf breakdown of books on one of my shelves (how does my to-read list break down across my shelves?), and then I'd like to find books on my to-read shelf that I have (also) marked as "non-fiction", etc.

The first feature just requires a group-by count(*) query that re-uses the query that lists books, and the second part is just a self-join on the shelf-associations. Neither is very expensive, and so scales well (I've built this support into various systems).

If there were APIs for this, I'd build a custom UI to do it. The only alternative now is to crawl the APIs and build my own DB - not an approach I want to take.

Thanks - Patrick

[William, Goodreads engineer]

Patrick, faceted search has been on our list of "features we want to add" for a long time. Unfortunately, addressing more basic issues with search is more important at the moment. I've added your “+1” to our faceted search ticket, though.

One workaround that I see is to call our reviews.list method for a shelf, and then use the elements in the response to see all the shelves for each book. I think that gives you a straightforward way to narrow by shelf.