Quote:
Originally Posted by travger
@kiwidude - I don't yet know if I want to exclude comments, though your example with authors is a good one. It means I have to start tags like 'werewolf', 'vampire', 'magic' and whatever. I don't like having lot of tags. If I want to find all alien telepath yarns, seems like I'd get better results if I keep searching the comments too.
I'll consider it for a few years.  |
I understand what you are saying, and if searching across my Calibre library in that way was important to me I would be trying to find a way to make it work too. The problem I have with trying to do this though is that the quality of the search results is only as good as the data you have in your library. There is no guarantee that a book about vampires is going to have vampire somewhere in the comments - in fact I would suggest most of the time it won't from the books I have seen.
That is - unless you add the data there yourself of course. And if you are adding data yourself, then there can be advantages to putting it into the tags field (such as ease of searching to allow access via the tags browser etc).
It is a bit like a fun "debate" Starson17 and I have had a few times about the value of the "random tags" that you get if you take in tags from Google Books. His argument is that it is quite cool to be able to do a search for some arbitrary criteria like a character name or location and have matches come back. Now I agree that would be very cool - if it "worked" properly. But it is garbage in, garbage out. There is no quality control over the tagging process (just like there is no consistency or rules over what a publisher/author puts in the synopsis for a book), hence it is down to dumb luck as to what search results if any you will get back. For his purposes, some results are better than none, so it works great for him. For me who has rather too many OCD tendencies, getting only "some" at best is not useful.
All of which means that if I want to search about a *subject* (that I know I haven't specifically tagged), I am far more likely to google specialist websites for recommended books on that subject (and then cross-reference with my library) than I am to search the comments on my Calibre books.
But I am just playing devil's advocate here. If you are happy with your search results then go for it. For myself it drove me mental to quickly search for an author like Lee Child by typing "child" and having many hundreds of results being returned because they had a word like "children" in their comments, or because Lee Child had made some soundbite as promo for some other unrelated book. I rarely type the search prefixes (too slow/clumsy to type) and don't like having flow interrupted with popup dialogs as you do for advanced search. So turning off default searching on fields other than the ones I actually want to search rocked my world
