Life of Pi & Calibre's search engine

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

@PatNY - personally I 100% agree that the default should be to not search the comments fields. It is one of the first things I change when I install calibre for other people. However it is a battle I briefly tried to fight and lost a long time ago. The concession I did help win was in getting a preferences option available (thanks to chaley for the work) so at least users could do it without modifying source code.

I'm guessing the other devs haven't changed their mind on this issue by now, but you never know

And yes, not sure what special juice itimpi was drinking today when he posted, but searches are most definitely an and not an or when not specified.

kiwidude, thanks to you and chaley for working to get that tweak added in. It works very very well.That's a good idea about changing the defaults when installing Calibre for newbies. I could be doing that for some family members over the holidays so it's a good suggestion.

When I first started using Calibre I had only a few dozen books in my library so search results, while broad, were not problematic. It's only as time has gone on and my library has significantly grown that search results were getting more and more vexing.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by PatNY

BTW, in my actual search in calibre, I was using no quotes around the search terms. I just used them in my original post here to try to make the post easier to understand.

When discussing search strings using quotes in your post where you didn't use quotes in the search does not make things easier to understand. When I responded in post 6, quotes were critical to my points. Quotes are always there or not there based on the search. You might want to re-read (mentally correcting the and/or error you pointed out) that post with this understanding in mind.

Originally Posted by PatNY

You're saying whether you put quotes in or not, the advanced search will assume them, right?

Yes, as I outlined in my first post the search string that is entered in the search field using the advanced search placed

title:"life pi"

in the search bar, which obviously is using quotes. When using the advanced search, the resultant search string is always shown exactly in the search field and can be analyzed from there.

Originally Posted by PatNY

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.

Yes Google does handle it slightly different as Kovid explained previously.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

The only difference is google seems to interpret a space in a quoted string as being "any punctuation" which calibre does not.

This means for "life pi" Google will find any instance of life pi regardless of any punctuation that is between life and pi. So along with life pi Google returns hits for life. Pi and life, Pi and life: Pi etc...

Originally Posted by PatNY

I agree with kiwidude that the book summary metadata should not be included in the default basic search.

It looks like we agree on this point.

[kovidgoyal]

Personally, I often search for the name of a character/event/place in a book (as I dont always remember title/author names). Since these are often mentioned in the comments, searching comments is a good thing for me. Furthermore, since most users start out with/remain with relatively small book collections, searching all metadata by default usually has no severe side effects.