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0 pointsfreddie_mercury5y ago0 comments

> 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.

That's what they are complaining about.

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michaelt5y ago

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"

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