07-11-2013, 10:23 AM | #1 |
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Kobo's lousy search function
Does anybody agree the Kobo shop has just about the worst possible search function imaginable?
Probably because of my IP I'm routinely routed through to http://www.kobobooks.nl. Then when I search for "watson before i go to sleep" I don't really find Watson's novel "Before I go to sleep" very easily. The Dutch translation of it is at the top, but only as the *second* hit. Why on earth is "Ibiza to go or not to go?" by Rianne Verwoert the first hit? And why don't I get the English version of the novel? It's in the shop, I found it some other way. But I don't feel like browsing page after page of irrelevant search results for this. And this is just one example. In many other cases it really takes some time to find the title you want. Whereas at Amazon I nearly always find the right title almost before I've finished typing it -- or even when I've misspelled it. Really. What a lousy lousy search engine they have. It's almost as though they don't *want* to sell books. |
07-11-2013, 10:36 AM | #2 |
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It's been criticized since Kobo first launched. It's better than it used to be, but I often have more luck using Google to search for books on Kobo.
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07-11-2013, 10:41 AM | #3 |
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When I sesrched the NL site for
Code:
Watson "before i go to sleep" Now yes, I am coming from a Canadian IP address. |
07-11-2013, 12:58 PM | #4 |
Nameless Being
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Oddly enough my experience was different from PeterT's, though his search criteria definitely produced better results.
Knowing how to use a search engine, by using techniques such as placing phrases in quotation marks, will almost always produce better results. This is because computers are not very good at figuring out natural languages so they aren't very good at figuring out which words really ought to go together. |
07-11-2013, 03:42 PM | #5 | |
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Quote:
Regards, David |
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07-11-2013, 03:58 PM | #6 |
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Surely though, DWIM means searching for the term WATSON along with the term "before I go to sleep".
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07-11-2013, 04:38 PM | #7 | |
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Quote:
http://www.kobobooks.com/search/sear...+sleep%22&l=en I don't think kobo likes it if you put both author and title in the same search string. If you remove the quote around the search terms they will be treated as an OR, while with the quotes it will search for all terms. |
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07-11-2013, 05:18 PM | #8 |
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I think the search function might be improved with the new version of the Kobo site, which I know not everyone is getting right now. When I search for "watson before i go to sleep" (without the quotation marks) I get exactly one result - S.J. Watson's Before I Go To Sleep.
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07-11-2013, 08:38 PM | #9 |
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Am I the only weirdo who rarely uses search facilities on shop websites? I just do this:
https://www.google.com/search?num=10...Akobobooks.com |
07-12-2013, 03:08 AM | #10 | ||
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Quote:
I seldom put the author name and book title in the search field, though. Quote:
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