Search feature sloooooooooow

[20LEgend]

I have over 1600 titles on my Kindle at the moment so naturally "search" should come in very handy when looking for authors or titles. But it's horrendous! 9 out of 10 times I just give up because it is so slow. The whole unit seems to freeze. Is this an unfortunate trait of the Kindle or is the problem just mine?
I have the 3G version with keyboard in case that's important.

[DustyDisks]

Sounds normal, it does take time and the unit seems to think about it for a while before displaying results. And while all of that is happening , the unit appears to freeze.

K3-3G

[20LEgend]

Thanks DD, just wanted to be sure I didn't have a problem. Just timed a search, actually, after posting this and it took 5 1/2 minutes. Quicker to search my pages one-by-one it would seem.

[DreamWriter]

I have the same Kindle model with about 1,000 books on it. It does take a LONG time for it to complete a search, and for that reason I rarely use the feature. When I do search, I just set the Kindle aside and make allowance for the time needed.

[pidgeon92]

I think the problem is that it is not searching just the author and title information, it is looking for the search terms in the complete text of all 1,600 books.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

I think the problem is that it is not searching just the author and title information, it is looking for the search terms in the complete text of all 1,600 books.

[wallcraft]

I have a work around, but it may not be practical for everyone.

As pidgeon92 says, the problem is that the Kindle is searching the entire text of all your ebooks, rather than just the title and author (or even all the metadata). It speeds this up by pre-indexing all the ebooks, but this means that about 1/3 of all the space used by ebooks is for the index files and search is still slow when you have lots of ebooks. Amazon really should have a "search titles" or "search metadata" option, which would be equivalent to what most other vendors have for search while outside a particular ebook. It turns out that the Kindle does have a title search, which it does for un-indexed ebooks. So the work around is to not have any indexed ebooks. Here is how I did this:

1. Reset to Factory Defaults (menu -> settings -> menu)
2. Turn off indexing
3. Restore all ebooks via Calibre (or from Amazon)

After doing this, my title searches take only a few seconds, and end with "Items Not Yet Indexed (1,382)". Note that I am getting hits from the titles of those 1,382 ebooks.

The drastic part of this is the Factory Reset. This wipes all your ebooks and all your settings (e.g. last read location clippings etcetera). These may be recoverable from Amazon if you are syncing into the cloud. The reason for the Factory Reset is to get an empty (or nearly empty) \system\Search Indexes folder. I don't know if there is a way to edit the contents of the Search Indexes folder without doing a factory reset. I tried deleting everything before resorting to the reset, but I think you need to at least keep Index.db. The Factory Reset approach definitely works.

Turning off indexing does not require jailbreaking your Kindle (must be v3 firmware or above), but it gets turned on again after every restart and you have to manually turn it off again. Here is Snowman's HOWTO

You do not have to jailbreak in order to disable indexing. Use the (undocumented) debug option:

• At the home screen, press del to get a text box. You need to do this for each command.
• Type ;debugOn then press enter [Capital O; the text-box will disappear, nothing will appear to have happened]
• Check debug status by typing ~help. This will list the debug commands.
• Enter the command ~disableIndexing [capital I] and enter
• Finally, enter ;debugOff and enter. Check by typing ~help again. If you get a list of commands, then debug is still on, otherwise your k3 will search for this string.
• Debug and disableIndexing do not persist across reboots. If you make a mistake or just get lost, simply do a reboot to get back to normal.

You can first try the ;debugOn and ~help to confirm that the ~disableIndexing is listed before doing anything drastic to your Kindle. If you mistype a command you will get a search instead of a silent return to the home screen. Use the Sym key to get ";" and "~".

Resets are not normally needed very often, although they are needed when you update collections via Calibre.

[osnova]

wallcraft, you choose to give up indexing and searching in your books. The text search is important for me and I can't give it up. For this reason, I only keep a relatively small number of books on the Kindle at any one time, with the rest in the Amazon archive or my computer.

[Harlock415]

I have that same problem. It's just having a lot of books. Wish the next firmware upgrade would have a search narrowed down to author or title.

[pidgeon92]

Originally Posted by Harlock415

I have that same problem. It's just having a lot of books. Wish the next firmware upgrade would have a search narrowed down to author or title.

Yep. This should be a search option.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by osnova

The text search is important for me and I can't give it up. For this reason, I only keep a relatively small number of books on the Kindle at any one time, with the rest in the Amazon archive or my computer.

This is a viable alternative, but all such "work arounds" involve trade-offs. Amazon could implement options without trade-offs, but they have had several years to do so without any significant updates. In addition to search within titles, another option that Amazon should offer is search within a collection, which would allow for searching within a subset of all ebooks. That way you could keep all your ebooks on the device and still perhaps have fast enough searches (search speed might be effected by the number of index files, as well as the number actually searched, though).

[Synergi]

Originally Posted by osnova

wallcraft, you choose to give up indexing and searching in your books. The text search is important for me and I can't give it up. For this reason, I only keep a relatively small number of books on the Kindle at any one time, with the rest in the Amazon archive or my computer.

Agreed, exact phrase search across my entire library was the selling point for me on Kindle.

[20LEgend]

Wallcraft, great advice, thanks.
Can you clarify for me, Even after restoring Factory settings would I still be required to follow Snowman's advice EVERY time I turn kindle back on?
Thanks to the rest of you guys for your input. I appreciate this wont suit everyone's needs so maybe it can be an update for another day.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by 20LEgend

Can you clarify for me, Even after restoring Factory settings would I still be required to follow Snowman's advice EVERY time I turn kindle back on?

Yes, if you actually turn off the power or do a reset (e.g. for updating collections via Calibre). It isn't needed when waking up from the screensaver. There may be a way to make the process easier on a jailbroken Kindle, either by binding the debugger options to keypresses (e.g. via launchpad) or by adding them explicitly to a startup script.

[20LEgend]

Thanks, you've been very helpful. Have a gold star