Goodreads Is Broken
That first graphic with failed title search results reminded me of a project I did working on a library catalog search using Solr.<p>We tuned the relevancy ranking to work for exactly those sorts of searches, and put the things the OP was looking for on top (or at least under other books with exact same title). His examples look just like some of our QA searches for our relevancy ranking (in addition to standard tf&#x2F;idf: boost adjacent words matching higher than non-adjacent or out of order; boost match of complete title higher than partial title; boost match before the subtitle colon more than after; boost <i>title</i> matches more than author more than other fields; etc).<p>And this was ~5 years ago, and this was an underfunded university library IT department where the development team consisted basically of me, just using stock Solr for relevancy ranking (the tuning came in how we constructed and boosted our indexed fields). No fancy machine learning, just configuring fields and boosts deterministically.<p>So, this could be done, if they cared about the site at all.<p>[In fact, hey, i can give you actual examples from that project. Turns out there are a lot of books called &quot;the confession&quot; -- we didn&#x27;t do anything fancy to try to guess which one more readers would be looking for.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catalyst.library.jhu.edu&#x2F;catalog?q=the+confession" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catalyst.library.jhu.edu&#x2F;catalog?q=the+confession</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catalyst.library.jhu.edu&#x2F;catalog?utf8=✓&amp;search_field=all_fields&amp;q=catch+and+kill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catalyst.library.jhu.edu&#x2F;catalog?utf8=✓&amp;sear...</a><p>(hope I don&#x27;t &quot;slashdot effect&quot; my former employer...)]