Better “Your Books” searching

It's finally out-out.

See the blog post here:
http://blog.librarything.com/main/2014/11/better-your-books-searching/

As I wrote on the blog:

We’d like to thank all the members who’ve been testing the system, but especially the clever and indefatigable bnielsen.

There are a couple lingering bugs, but we thought it was time to roll it out officially.

Excellent!

In case anyone else thought they already knew all about the search and didn't bother to click through to the blog post, be aware there's a whole stableful of ponies that Tim just mentioned almost as an afterthought:


We’ve also extended our new and improved search abilities to searching the books of your fellow group-members, your connections, and Legacy Libraries. Wondering who in our Legacy Libraries shares your love of The Hobbit, who else in the 75 Books Challenge is a Frankenstein fan, or who among your LibraryThing Connections has a copy of Ivanhoe you can borrow? You can find all three of these on one page, here, where you can switch between them using the tabs at the top of the page.


It doesn't quite work - the "See in member's catalog" failed in the tests I tried - but it's quite nice even as is.

I love the new search the books of your fellow group members. I'll be using that one.

>5 lorax:

Fixed. Thanks.

I love the new search the books of your fellow group members. I'll be using that one.

Actually, it existed before. But it was sloooow.

I really like the new search so far. It definitely seems a lot faster.

Of course, the mention of group catalogue searching makes me think of a pony: it would be really nice if we could search on specific date ranges in the Date Finished field ;). This isn't necessary in an individual catalogue because you can accomplish more or less the same thing just by sorting, but that's not an option for group catalogues.

>2 timspalding: Thanks!

The new search often gives me what I want. For the other cases I'd like a bit larger input limit than the current 160 characters.

30712497 OR 30754920 OR 30754939 OR 30755032 OR 30955729 OR 30955791 OR 30955822 OR 30961468 OR 30961557 OR 30961589 OR 30964519 OR 30964541 OR 30964563 OR 30965976 OR 30965987 OR 30965999 OR 30966036 OR 30966044 OR 35973764

is 225 characters and would allow me to specify 19 books in a search set. A size limit of 250 characters would be fine, IMHO. Feel free to make it larger.

I have some 625 books with the "words" ?? or ??? implying an incomplete review. Since I can't search for ?? with the new search, I'll probably replace ?? with something else and so I'd appreciate a way of identifying them in as large sets as possible.

Hmm, maybe I'll just replace my ??'s with the word groundsloth :-)

Thanks for the explanation of the new syntax.
Also for the faster searching.

Is there any way to get to the "search your groups" page (https://www.librarything.com/index_catalog.php?page=group) without that url? (i.e., can there be a link from the groups page or Your Groups page to that specific search feature? or a module to add to one of the dashboard pages?)

Thanks again!

Using the feature mentioned in >11 LucindaLibri:
Searching the Feminist Theory group for "the second sex" returns no books, though The AND Second AND Sex returns quite a few.
Am I misunderstanding how to search for an exact phrase/title? (Having to use AND between each word in the title is rather tedious and doesn't match how the wiki says it should work.)

>12 LucindaLibri: Did you try the search with or without the quotation marks?

>12 LucindaLibri:

I'm not in that group, but it works for me in Feminist SF with and without the quotes.

>14 lorax: Tim fixed it here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/182576#4908413

>15 jjwilson61:
Yes, fixed now, (the "second sex" bug :)
>13 PhaedraB: & >14 lorax:
The issue was the ability to use quotation marks, not this specific search. Leaving them out returned lots of other books along with the desired title (many feminist books have the words "the" and "sex" in the title).

>16 LucindaLibri:

I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me. I wasn't claiming that the issue was the quotes - I tested it both ways because I didn't know which way you had tried. (It's moot at any rate, since Tim fixed it.)

>17 lorax:
I was questioning your definition of "it works"

>18 LucindaLibri:

You said that with quotes returned no books for you. It worked - that is, it returned the desired title, for me. (This is moot now of course, since it was fixed.)

We need to up the minimum bugs ;)

>21 timspalding:

Just add a platinum badge for bnielsen. :-)

Or don't have so many bugs. ;-)

>20 Collectorator: Thanks. Let me share it

>22 lorax: I'll second your last suggestion :-)

Psssh, amateurs. ;)

>21 timspalding: I'd still love to see stats for how many people have each of the helper badges.

#25 by @_Zoe_>

This is probably not the aggregation you are looking for. However, for any given user you can find the badge profile with this kind of URL:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/Keeline/stats/badges

http://www.librarything.com/profile/{user}/stats/badges

James

>24 brightcopy: Why am I not surprised :-) I think they should just deal out a gold bug for every 25 bugs.

Actually earning a gold bug requires two skills. 1. Finding bugs. 2. Getting Tim et al. to fix them.

I think you're easily 4 times better than me at both :-)

Is it true that the "# books in all your collections" link is missing?

I seem to remember that when I searched in my collection, while a sub-collection was selected, there would always be a link to take me to the search result for all my collections. I miss it because I am lazy...

>28 divinenanny:

I don't see it either and I'd like it back!

>28 divinenanny:

Whether or not that link is present previously depended on exactly what you did to get to the page. I posted this inconsistency as a bug back in 2013 (speaking of the "getting Tim to fix your bugs" part of the equation): https://www.librarything.com/topic/153388 , but admittedly I was thinking in terms of "always show", not "never show".

>30 lorax: Thanks for the clarification. I just commented on your bug too. All I know is that the way I searched always used to get the link, now it never does.

>27 bnielsen: Yeah, but I'm slacking now so it probably won't be too long until I'm surpassed.

>37 jjwilson61: I really hope I don't find 80+ more bugs in new search :-)

For those trolling any old posts,

New Search update from @miketopper!

See: https://www.librarything.com/topic/188965#5095698.

This may be answered elsewhere (I swear I've looked). When searching my library for the term "bugs" nothing comes up, though when searching for "insects" the catalog rightly finds the book with that word in the title. Is there a way to make the search function more responsive to expanded search terms as in this example?

What do you mean by expanded search terms. Do you expect LT to look for all the synonyms of a word during the search? I can tell you that LT doesn't do that and I don't believe there are any plans for LT to do that.

>36 MrStrand:

That's a very very hard problem, and not necessarily desirable behavior. So, no. "Bugs" will not find "insects" nor vice versa short of Google-level intelligence. (And it annoys me no end when Google "helpfully" finds synonyms for me. I usually know what I'm looking for and have chosen my words accordingly.)

Yes, at present we are not contemplating synonyms. I recently got a bug report from someone upset that a book about wasps showed up when they searched bees. This was because a subject heading included both. If we did it on purpose, I think we'd have a problem.

We see in tag combining all the time that words can have different meanings in different languages. Search needs to give reasonable results in all the LT site languages. If I enter 'Roma' I don't want all the results for both Rome and Gypsy.