Your books Search failure

Back on 11/28/2025, I added a book collecting stories by Lester Dent, Hell's Hoofprints, Book ID 301290552. Today I finished reading the book and searched for it in All Collections by title and by author, with no result. I therefore ended up adding it once again, with new Book ID 302069110. I am able to find that one, and only that one, in a search of All Collections in Your books. However, when I go to the list of Lester Dent's works, both entries by me show in the list, uncombined, and I can navigate to either of them. I can also see the earlier added book if I scroll through an unfiltered list of all the books in Your books.

I can delete one of the copies, but I'm hoping for an explanation of this search failure, in case other books of mine are similarly hidden from my search. Is this problem affecting others? I appreciate that sometimes there is a lag in indexing new books, but books added before and books added after are showing up when I search my Your books, All Collections.

Given that you added it just a few days ago, what happens if you look at your collections by entry date? Is the book there (or, rather, are there two copies)? This would test whether it is properly entered or if it is a search problem.

I strongly doubt that it's your browser or platform, but while you're at it, you might as well add the standard additional information:
1. Device you're searching with (Windows computer, Mac computer, Chromebook, iPhone, Android phone), including the model (e.g. Dell laptop, iPhone 15)
2. Operating system version (e.g. Windows 11, iOS 26)
3. If using a phone, whether you're using a browser or the LT app
4. If using a browser, then the browser and version (Chrome 101.2, FireFox 145.0.2)

>1 harrygbutler:

Odd, indeed.

If I look at the books you added on 11-28, it's there. But if I search your catalog for it, only the more recent one appears. Also, I noticed you tagged it "pb", so I looked at the list of books on which you used that tag, and the 11-28 addition appears there as well.

>3 lilithcat:

Could there be a hidden character in the name of the book? Not likely (and I tried copying the name to look for one) -- but given that it looks to me as if this was a bulk import, it might be worth looking at the source file and checking for special characters.

>1 harrygbutler: It sounds like a system glitched and your library might need to be reindexed by the admin.
Recommend NOT deleting the book until an admin gets to this thread.

>1 harrygbutler: Likely a catalog search indexing issue; taking a look now!

>1 harrygbutler: Okay, your catalog's reindexed and both copies are showing up now in a search!

>7 kristilabrie: Thank you!

And thank you to everyone else for their assistance, too!

Closing as resolved.

This issue seems to be happening to me, too.
I just ran a search for two books I suspected I'd added to my collection. I used the search words "society of the first african families." The search came back as "No books found." Yet, when I went to my Tags list I was able to find both books, and both books have those exact words in their titles. They've been in my collection since October 2022 and January 2024, respectively. Why aren't they coming up using the Search function? See attached screenshots. Thanks.

I've been getting intermittent search failures over the past few days when running a tag search 'tags:a not tags:b' or when I'm searching in the relationships box. It never fails completely, but on occasion I get far less results than there should be. I suspect it's bot activity.

I've had search issues for weeks, only being able to RELIABLY find a book in my catalogue by ISBN.
Today I had a zinger: I entered "tales of the south pacific" (exactly that) and got zero returns despite knowing for a fact there were at least two. I retyped, reran, got bupkis.
HOWEVER when I entered "Tales of the South Pacific" with the capital letters I got 51 returns, including four copies of the actual book.
Has the search function gotten so precious that we need to capitalize formally when searching? SERIOUSLY?!?!?

>12 BookHavenAZ:

I think you'll find the "tales of the south pacific" works fine. It takes a second to come up, because you have 130,000 books, but it works. Can you try again?

>I ran the search several times and it didn't act like it was waiting, just returned a negative result. I've been routinely running negative searches twice already because sometimes the first one is negative. On this one I attempted five times before using caps.
Of course NOW it works...like when your computer is wonky but shapes up when you call the tech over. :)
I've been working on paring down the inactive items (took out about 20,000 over the last couple months). It's ponderous tedious work since the power edit isn't super effective with large amounts of items. But I've finally managed to purge everything that sold 2020 or earlier and didn't come back. If I had any help in the store I'd have someone go along and verify entries that have been here forever and not moved. But that's a "someday" thing. It's really hard keeping up with the store and this many books.

Just tried searching my books for Mahfouz, which I knew was there but turned up nothing. Searching all LT yielded results, including our books. And this sort of search has happened more than once of late …

>15 jasbro: A site search finds work records so I'm not sure what you mean that it found your books. If you just mean that it found the work that corresponds to your book does it have a box near the top with your book information including a button to edit your book? If not then it doesn't prove that you have that book in your LT library

>15 jasbro: There is definitely something odd going on here.
If I click on your link to Naguib Mahfouz, and look at the Members section, you show up in there as having 7 works by them. If I search your library, or sort by author and scroll through, none show up. Maybe they are there as an other author, or an unconfirmed secondary order, or maybe you library needs reindexing.

>16 jjwilson61: Exactly. The site search returned results with that name, including works that we have in our library. Accessing work records that the site search returned led to our record of the work (complete with the box and the edit button), which "Search Your Books" on the Home page didn't return.

>17 rodneyvc: Thanks for your validation. Out of curiosity, I'm well familiar and frequently use "Recalculate editions" (even though I'm never quite sure what that does), "Recalculate title/author," and "Recalculate cover," but I'm not familiar with re-indexing a library. Is there a way to force that, or do we just await a server's processing?

And the answer is: All seven of Naguib Mahoufz's works in our library were added from the Library of Congress, where his works are credited to Najīb Maḥfūẓ - an entirely different spelling of the same name, with diacriticals and all. So "Search Your Books" is a literal, character-by-character search of our work records only, whereas a site search captures all related variants more broadly. If I ever realized that, I hadn't focused on it.

Standing down now ...