Improved tag searching
I've improved the tag searching. You can now ask for things like:
I'd love to hear people on the topic. It's clear to me that there should be a link in the catalog view to search that catalog. That functionality is already there. But should the search tab do the same thing, displaying every matching book and user in the catalog view? This seems an admirable way of looking at your books, but pretty poor when looking at others. I'm thinking the search should go instead to a page like the tag or author pages, that "rolls up" all the copies under a single book title. Clicking on the book title on that page would take you to the book-detail pages, but there would also be a link to see the books in the catalog. Hmm...
- birds, beasts — all books tagged both birds and beasts
- +birds +beasts — another way to say the same thing
- +birds -beasts — all books tagged birds but not tagged beasts
- greek* — all book with tags starting with "greek" (eg., "greek", "greek history," etc.)
- * history — all books ending with "history" (eg., "greek history," "roman history")
- *dog*, -fiction — all books with the word "dog" somewhere in the tags, excluding fiction
I'd love to hear people on the topic. It's clear to me that there should be a link in the catalog view to search that catalog. That functionality is already there. But should the search tab do the same thing, displaying every matching book and user in the catalog view? This seems an admirable way of looking at your books, but pretty poor when looking at others. I'm thinking the search should go instead to a page like the tag or author pages, that "rolls up" all the copies under a single book title. Clicking on the book title on that page would take you to the book-detail pages, but there would also be a link to see the books in the catalog. Hmm...
posted by Tim at 1:10 PM
15 Comments:
This is a feature I've been waiting for. Thanks for being psychic!
You probably know this, Tim, but I'm getting error messages when attempting the new searches. Searches for "* culture" or "birds, bees" are not working.
a hint - if you want to, say, find all books in your catalog NOT tagged as fiction, try searching "*, -fiction" (just "-fiction" won't work.) i'm guessing that this wouldn't work for books that aren't tagged at all, but as lt seems to be burping a bit at the moment i can't check.
It's not just the "tag search" that's goofing. Catalogs, profiles, recently added books, zeitgeist, and the tags tab are all coming up with error messages, and those are mostly of the "too many connections" sort. :/
Wow, cool, thanks!
And someday, RSS of these searches!
(;
*ducks and runs*
is there a suggestion/experts answers blog somewhere rather than sending emails to Tim and overloading his mailbox?
I've tried * latin * (on the model of your * dog *) on my own tags and it returned nothing. Removing the space after the tag (* latin*, as opposed to * latin *) yielded tags that end with the word 'latin' but not with tags that read only 'latin.'
To return all tags which contain 'latin' (whether by itself or in combination) I had to remove both spaces: *latin*.
I made a test tag (appropriately 'latin test') and this was returned by searching *latin *, i.e. without the first space but with the second.
Finally, I searched all tags for * dog * (the syntax of the example) and it yielded 'sled dog racing.'
Conclusion? Spaces are key! * dog * will not return books with 'dog' somewhere in the tage, but only wit dog in between other words, with spaces.
I used periods in some of my tags (e.g. or.greek, tr.english for a work originally in Greek which has been translated to English. These are only returned if you use asterisks without spaces.
You can email me at timspalding@librarything.com.
A forum is coming. I can only roll out one or two major changes a week. That's about two changes together.
Dennis. Very good point. I'll fix the wording.
Thank you very much for this new feature. Once the kinks are worked out, this will be very much more useful than the existing tag search. It also has considerable implications for the way that users should most effectively use tags.
By this I mean, the tagging strategy one should employ to best achieve a certain effect depends almost entirely on the nature of the available ways to retrieve information based on those tags. We now have the choice of the constructive approach "military, history" and the deconstructive approach "*military*, *history*". Someone should probably write a little essay about these choices.
I have to say this, though - LT's "power edit" makes it easier to correct and/or change styles of tagging than any application-level ui I've used before. Combining "power edit" and "search" is quite remarkable, a very Unix-y way to get very disparate and focused mass changes. Congratulations are in order.
Anonymous: Thanks. I see your point, and I'm sure there's an effect there. But I also think that users will primarily access tags by clicking on the tag, not by searching and even less by complex searching. Most people just don't use +s, -s and *s all that much in their searches. It feels foreign to them.
I contemplated having a "partial tag" check button instead of the *. It would work nicely on the search tab, but I think it would clutter up the catalog search box.
WHEEEE!
And searching for a short tag like "ai" now seems to work, and IIRC it didn't before. :)
I tried searching for "-paperback -hardback" so i could find all the books which I haven't remember to mark with one or the other.
Unfortunately I think it matches all the books which either have no "paperback" tag or have no "hardback" tag. So basically everything.
Any way to fix this or am I off the mark?
Yippee! Thanks, Tim. Can't wait to take it for a drive.
hippietrail: Maybe some duplicate tags were messing with your number, but that trick works well for me. Try searching for all, then -hardback, then -hardback -softcover, then -hardback -softcover -fiction, etc. I think you'll see the number decline each time.
Let me know if you have problems.
Tim, are you planning to put together all these instructions and tips (such as the rules for improved tag searching) and provide a beefed-up FAQ one of these days?
I for one am beginning to have difficulty remembering all the bits and bobs that are available on LibraryThing, and I doubt that I'm alone. At the moment most of these tips are only found scattered throughout your blog. Could be particularly challenging for brand new users.
If you'd like to do it, but simply don't have time, perhaps you could ask for volunteers ;-) I wouldn't mind writing up a subsection or two.
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