> Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for.
> ... searching for 'holiday heart robayo' does
Well, this already makes Goodreads worse than any local librarian/book seller. I could go up to the counter of my local library and ask for Inferno and the person at the counter would ask "Are you looking for the one by Dante or by Dan Brown?".
> if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?"
I find this disingenuous. Bookstore clerks don't hit a dead end just because of some missing parameter in the question posted to them. If they did they're losing a lot of potential sales. Plus, any decent inventory software could aide them.
There's any number of authentic reasons why a customer might know only partial info about a book and it's a clerk/librarian's job to help them. "Do you have Narnia books?", "Do you have Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe?", "Do you have this fairy tale from C. S. Lewis" are all questions I'd expect a clerk/librarian to be able to answer adequately.
Even worse, quoting from the article:
> the first five suggestions were books that didn't even contain both words in their titles, despite the site having an entry for the book.
What kind of search system ranks books that don't even have the query that high?
(Disclaimer: I tried searching for "holiday heart" on Goodreads while logged out as a matter of due diligence; I did not get these subpar results. While Robayo's book is nowhere in sight, the search results at least have the search query in their title. Reasonable enough.)
I've complained about Goodreads a lot, but the idea that their search is bad is new to me. (Except in that I can't open each result in the dropdown in a new tab. Very annoying.)
If I type in Inferno, it drops down Dan Brown's, Sylvian Reynard's, and then Dante's. If I search for Narnia...actually it pops up as the first guess when I just type "N".
Turns out there are edge cases where it does poorly, but it's never been a problem for me, and I search Goodreads pretty often.
EDIT: I should clarify, searching by title or author works really well. Searching by additional metadata is missing, and that's very sad -- I end up just browsing lists. Openlibrary search has a much steeper learning curve, but you can search by reading level, or publisher, or anything.
> What kind of search system ranks books that don't even have the query that high?
The author is being disingenuous. The search terms aren't in the book title but they are in the name of the series the book is part of. Presumably because a lot of people search for "Jack Reacher" and expect to find something useful.
If I run the google query "holiday heart" site:goodreads.com I get the Margarita García Robayo translation on the first page of 10 results.
On the other hand, when I use the search on goodreads itself, the Robayo book - with 298 ratings - is not among the first 20 results.
Ahead of it are books like:
"Home for the Holidays (Heart of the Wolf #28; Silver Town Wolf #9)" - no phrase match, pluralises holidays, splits the query between the book title and series, and has 178 ratings.
"The Pastry Queen Christmas: Big-Hearted Holiday Entertaining, Texas Style" - again no phrase match, heart becomes big-hearted, and it's a subtitle, and the book has 122 ratings
"Holiday of the Heart (Heart, #4)" - finally a book with both words in the title! But no phrase match, and this book has.... 2 ratings.
If the search doesn't support phrase matches, doesn't rank precise matches higher, and doesn't rank more popular books higher - how the hell is it ranking things?
Of course, goodreads is hardly the first site to have a shitty search that causes users to google things instead. The ranking could well be "whatever order elasticsearch produces"
Well, this already makes Goodreads worse than any local librarian/book seller. I could go up to the counter of my local library and ask for Inferno and the person at the counter would ask "Are you looking for the one by Dante or by Dan Brown?".
> if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?"
I find this disingenuous. Bookstore clerks don't hit a dead end just because of some missing parameter in the question posted to them. If they did they're losing a lot of potential sales. Plus, any decent inventory software could aide them.
There's any number of authentic reasons why a customer might know only partial info about a book and it's a clerk/librarian's job to help them. "Do you have Narnia books?", "Do you have Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe?", "Do you have this fairy tale from C. S. Lewis" are all questions I'd expect a clerk/librarian to be able to answer adequately.
Even worse, quoting from the article:
> the first five suggestions were books that didn't even contain both words in their titles, despite the site having an entry for the book.
What kind of search system ranks books that don't even have the query that high?
(Disclaimer: I tried searching for "holiday heart" on Goodreads while logged out as a matter of due diligence; I did not get these subpar results. While Robayo's book is nowhere in sight, the search results at least have the search query in their title. Reasonable enough.)