Indexing and Searching on the Kindle PW

[kevinpars]

I have had all Kindle e-ink generations except for the K2. Pretty experienced user. When i got my PW I downloaded about 50 books from the Amazon Cloud. I then plugged the PW in to charge and to give it time to Index. No problems. I did the test of searching for some nonsense term (asldk;hgdsfglhj) and got no hits and I could tell that all books had indexed.

Then side loaded about 50 other documents. This was a mix of self made documents, web articles, free books from other sources such as Gutenberg, my wife is a librarian and has access to a few sites like netgalley, etc. Anyway, these books did not index.

Anyway, I started playing around a little bit and found that even the books that had supposedly indexed and allowed for searches, did not pull up any results. The only searches that worked were title searches. For example, if I searched from the home screen for "Radio" it returned the title "My Life in Radio" by Bob Edwards. However, when I opened that book and did a search for "Radio" or for another obvious term that would be in the book like "NPR" it returned 0 hits.

I tried this in some other books - searched for "wolf" in Game of Thrones or searched character names in other books. No go. Anyone else seeing this? I suppose I could clean off the Doc folder and start over but I thought I would check and see if others had this problem - or if I am missing a setting somewhere.

[jswinden]

I don't have any side loaded books but I just tried it in Boardwalk Empire and the search works. I wonder if a restart would help? Sounds like the indexing might have got corrupted.

[kevinpars]

Thanks for checking! I tried a restart earlier with no success but I will play around with it and will post back when I find a solution. I just hope the solution doesn't include starting over!

[sirmaru]

Originally Posted by kevinpars

Thanks for checking! I tried a restart earlier with no success but I will play around with it and will post back when I find a solution. I just hope the solution doesn't include starting over!

I downloaded the King James Bible specially constructed to have the verses indexed on the Kindle Keyboard. After 5 hours of indexing I could not even open the ebook. I removed it.

I also downloaded my NET Bible specially indexed for the verses to be searched and was able to read it. I allowed it to index overnight. I tried to search for a verse and it could not find it. I removed it.

However, I also downloaded the NIV Bible which worked very badly on the Kindle Keyboard. On the Paperwhite I was able to use the links to go to bible books fast. I was also able to search for phrases and it worked.

I downloaded the Bible Encyclopedia which worked great on the Kindle Keyboard. It worked even faster on the Paperwhite and I was able to get to linked verses immediately. I use that as my primary dictionary on the Paperwhite and the New Oxford American Dictionary as my secondary dictionary.

All other eBooks can be searched fine. Thus, it appears some eBooks specially constructed for the Kindle Keyboard will not index properly on the Paperwhite. Those specific eBooks also do not index properly on the Kindle Fire.

[tomsem]

Kindle Fire doesn't index anything. Every search is done on the fly and requires the book to be open.

Index does ignore a number of common words like 'the'.

You can force reindex of everything by hooking up USB and deleting everything in /system/Search Indexes

[Dragoro]

How do you tell when it is indexing, and when it is finished?

[jswinden]

On the PW on the Home screen touch the Search icon and type a nonsense text like "rty" and search for it. If indexing is taking place a message will be displayed saying X books are left to index, or words to that effect.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by jswinden

On the PW on the Home screen touch the Search icon and type a nonsense text like "rty" and search for it. If indexing is taking place a message will be displayed saying X books are left to index, or words to that effect.

Searching for '.' is sufficient. No need to waste precious keystokes.

[kevinpars]

Update - what tomsem suggested cleared up my problem. Deleted the old index files and it reindexed correctly this time. Not sure what glitch prevented it from doing it before, but I am good to go. Thanks for all suggestions!