Wow, I thought the Kobo search engine couldn't get any worse. But they've given the whole site an overhaul (not for the better, IMHO). And whether that's the reason or not, the search engine seems to have got even *worse*.
I tried to find some Dutch novels that have just been shortlisted for the Dutch equivalent to the Booker Prize. E.g. 'De dode arm' by Allard Schröder. Searching for all those words finds me nothing in the top results (and I'm not going to go browsing all the way to the end of the search results). Searching just for "Schröder" finds me
nothing.
Then
googling "schröder de dode arm kobo" finds me this:
http://store.kobobooks.com/es-nl/boo...V0OUSU5-mvPGwA
http://store.kobobooks.com/nl-nl/Sea...er=1&sort=none
So it's there, and other novels of his are there as well (under the wrongly typed name Schroder). Kobo just doesn't know how to find it.
How do they expect to sell books if their own search engine can't find it, they enter wrong info in their database and they don't have a search that's fuzzy enough to cope with that?
Stupid.
In other cases, you
can find a book. But the search engine is so picky. E.g. I search for:
Martin Bossenbroek - De Boerenoorlog
Because I copy/paste that from a website. Result: 17077 results, none of them seem to be relevant. What? Did it just render all titles that had a hyphen or a dash somewhere in the description? That doesn't make sense.
Then I search only for: Boerenoorlog. And I DO find it.
And note that it's not just the presence of the hyphen and the particle "de" (=the) that throws the search engine of. Searching for "Martin Bossenbroek Boerenoorlog" still gives me 19413 IRRELEVANT results rather than the specific book I'm looking for.
Do they ever test this search engine themselves? Other than by typing in Da Vinci Code and see if it works?
And actually, even that's f*** up now. If I search for Da Vinci Code on
http://store.kobobooks.com/nl-NL/, all I find is the Dutch translation.
If I search on
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-nl/, although this seems a Dutch storefront, I only find English language books with that title. (Brown's own thriller is not, by the way, the top result...)
I don't even get the option to choose Dutch language results, as I used to. Let alone other languages.
Really... did they test their new website before they put it online?