I only suggested a dropdown just to keep the gui clean compared to a dedicated author/title search. Though if that could be a replacement panel to appear on the LHS instead of the scroll and click categories thing that would work too. I was just raising the possibility of an alternative way to search which matches how "casual non-geek" users work who are accustomed to as I say most conventional book websites out there that don't just use an "all in one" approach. For instance FantasticFiction.co.uk is one website I end up using a lot, and they have both dedicated boxes and the dropdown options as well as A-Z indexes plus google on top. Lots of ways to skin the cat.
For anyone saying they would have to change the way they search - well no they wouldn't, they could just leave the dropdown at the default of "all" or whatever and life continues as it always has for you.
Nice to know quotes are not needed. However keep in mind that the text in the search box keeps changing as you drill into authors with Alt-A etc, so you do have to either carefully select/overtype or else retype the whole expression. Incidentally one behaviour I keep fruitlessly doing is hitting the back button on the mouse hoping for behaviour like a web browser to go back through my history of recent searches. And I don't just mean the ones that appear in the dropdown list - I mean whatever "view" I had applied at the time since Alt-A type filtering doesn't get added to the search history dropdown. If it remembered the search plus the sorting at the time would be nice too. Sorry going slightly o/t here.
However if I am flogging a dead horse over this without others wanting it too then so be it. Maybe there are other solutions. It would be nice to have a preferences option to *not* search comments and whatever else as they seem to be one of the main false positive causes. Yes I appreciate there are edge cases where searching metadata outside of title/author/series/tags is useful to someone but this is surely the rare exception rather than the norm? An option somewhere to turn this off in some way (or force people to use the advanced search for those cases) would at least reduce the noise for me.
In terms of improving the search output sorting - I guess the "randomness" in appearance/output is what has highlighted the issue to me. Now I know it isn't truly "random" but it is dependent on whatever sort I currently have applied at the time I search, number of matches plus bad luck on matching fields I don't give a crap about. For instance my default view is to sort by author->series->title - which means if I then search for a book title it could appear anywhere in the results. If however my last action in the GUI had sorted by title but I search for an author, then again the match I want could be anywhere in the results. Add in all the "noise" from comments matches or whatever else it searches and I just find it pretty frustrating.
A dropdown would help with sorting the search results but if you don't want that then I appreciate the difficulty of interpreting what it should apply. Maybe a "cheap" relevance algorithm would just solve it - i.e. prioritise "starts with" results over "contains", and matches in author/title fields over other places like comments. Just thinking out loud hoping something clicks with someone...
