[PatNY]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

You are correct it is looking for any book entry that has Life and of and pi any place in the fields searched. But my bigger point is accurate if you enclose Life of Pi in quotes like "Life of Pi" it will look for the exact string.

I used simply life pi for expediency. In this case I knew the whole title before I searched, but don't you think it is non-intuitive to have to put quotes around every entered phrase in a default basic search? And if one has hundreds of books in their library and has only a vague memory of some keywords in the title, then having to know the exact order of words and put every search in quotes would be timely and perhaps too error-prone. Searches are meant to be quick and efficient.

The advanced search does use quotes and finds things exactly as anyone would expect.

You're saying whether you put quotes in or not, the advanced search will assume them, right? Because as I explained in my previous post, I didn't actually use quotes in my life pi advanced search. I only put them in the initial post in this thread to differentiate the words from the rest of the sentence.

I'm not aware of any advanced search function I've used before that assumes quotes around the search terms when they are not actually typed in.

Searching for "life pi" does return anything because the string does not exist in your library database. Same search rules go for searching via Google.

I went to google and put in "life pi" and the entire first page of results I got are related to either the book, the movie that is now being made of the book, or the book's cover image. So Google does something very different.

You get the same results if you do a Google search on just life pi. Everything on the first page is related to the book.

Sure, there may be lots of results not related to the book, but since Google ranks results by relevancy, there is not a problem. The point is you can put life pi in, with or without quotes, and always come up with the book first.

I think the default search is as I would expect it to be in other search engines. The point of confusion, as kiwidude pointed out, is that searches automatically search the comments area too so there is quite a bit more data being searched then the obvious Title, Author, Series you would expect.

But the fact that the default search looks at all the metadata is exactly what I was referring to when I said it was "non-intuitive" and "non-standard." It results in overly-broad results.

I agree with kiwidude that the book summary metadata should not be included in the default basic search. In all the time I've been using Calibre, I've never once made a search based on something that I was looking for in the books summary section. It is 100% either title or author.

Perhaps the option to search ALL the book's metadata including the book summary is something that should be reserved for the advanced search.