Comments on: Big BM back-end changes

By: Tricia Miller

Tricia Miller — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:59:39 +0000

Two comments
1- I often do not receive a notification when a book I have wishlisted is available.
2- I have a number of books for which I only want one edition of the book. I receive numerous “related edition available” notifications for these. Can I make it stop?
3- Is it possible to add to the rules that if the edion of the book you post is listed in the database, it is “illegal” to pick a different edition, and write in the comments that this book is a diff edtion from the one listed? Many people do this, and I have ordered the wrong books, and often have to weed through a number of books that are incorrect and find the one that is.
4-Is it possible to enable the “search” feature on the forums?
5-Dog gonnit! Just recently I added books to bookmooch and paperback swap. In 3 cases, someone from paperback snatched the book up right away, and I accepted their request. Then, a day goes by in which I have forgotten to remove the book, and I receive a bookmooch request. I decline and get negative feedback. I realize that this is an option so people dont steal points by posting books they dont have, but givagirl a break
5- Would it be possbile to add a feature that enables us to remove a number of books from our wishlist at one time? I often add books to my wishlist with the all related edtions option. If I receive the book, I think have to go delete the wishlist extras. If they’re on the second page of my wishlist, then I have to
go to wish list
scroll down
click the button to move to page 2
scroll to find section of list with copies of the same book
select one of these books
delete
Return to page one
scroll down
etc etc. I am guessing you get the picture.

So! Thank you for all you do. I love that I can find the books I want so often!!

By: james

james — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:46:04 +0000

Ever think of using something like Hadoop for a distributed key-value architecture?

By: Brad

Brad — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 18:27:35 +0000

Would it be feasible to make the option to turn off the related edition notices for each book individually? I have some books that I only want a certain edition and would like to turn it off, but I have others that I’ll take any edition I can get, so I’d want it on.

Also when I remove books from the 2nd page of my wishlist, the first page reloads, so I have to go back to the 2nd page manually.

By: Taneli T

Taneli T — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:23:04 +0000

Advanced search has a bug (I think it’s been there even before this update):

1. Search for anything that has more results than fits on the first page (by default, more than 50 results) AND limit that search with Added recently: 1 days ago.

2. The first results page shows those 50 books, but when one clicks Next page, the second results page loses the “added recently: 1 days ago” setting and lists all the books in the database that contain the searched word.

For example: search the word “body” with added recently: 1 days ago. The first page is this:
http://www.bookmooch.com/m/s/body/-/0/50/0/-/-/-/-/-/a/-/-/-/1

But when clicking Next page, the second page is this:
http://www.bookmooch.com/m/s/body/-/1/50/0/-/-/-/-/-

As you can see straight from the url, some settings are missing on that second page. At this moment the first book on that second page is this http://www.bookmooch.com/m/detail/0708987281
and latest edition of it was added 2007/06/25, so the second page doesn’t honour the added recently setting.

Thanks.

By: Zjanette

Zjanette — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:08:08 +0000

Just one little question. I love to browse topics and I really would love to have a topic with “cook books” or “food”.
I know you can’t have 100.000 topics but would it be possible to add just this one?

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:01:28 +0000

I just updated my site search index to remove common words. My site consists of about 500 prose articles as opposed to book titles, so there are plenty of unimportant common words.

Unfortunately, the most common words were also the shortest words (the of and to a in for that on is with this as he by it be we his has – etc.)! So each word removed from the index is not a huge savings. For example, I only saved about 61KB by removing every instance of “the”, and about 21KB by removing “of”.

Even so, my search index is about 30% smaller now.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 03:57:38 +0000

My first thought was the same. All of my books I no longer need, as we all grow and change and go through phases in life, have all found happy homes and this process continues. I have found fantastic books, many needed for school, some for my own self-education and leisure and even a few gifts. This whole concept is brilliant and the work you put behind it is a beautifully appreciated passion.

Many, many thanks!

By: FJBryan

FJBryan — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:55:31 +0000

The “noise” words you indicate are known as “stop” words by the Library of Congress. Each language has them (der/die/das, mit, von in German; la/le, avec, de in French; the, and, of in English) and LC doesn’t catalogue books using them–you skip past those words to go to main title words. Rather than have to figure out what are stop words (a task that will only get worse as more books are posted in more languages) you might want to hit up some LC source to get a complete list of all stop words in all languages.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:23:52 +0000

Only seeing Topics that actually have books listed is a huge improvement! Now there’s just one page of Topics instead of tons (I don’t think I ever got to the end). Thanks. I didn’t realize before that most Topics were actually empty, and didn’t realize the book count was only rows in the database. I figured BM had zillions of books available!

Another Topics improvement might be to have hierarchical topics if possible. I’m intersted in colonial American history, but the most narrow filter I can find is just “History”, with page after page after page of books. Without front covers, the long lists of just authors and titles text is difficult to parse visually.

Could Topics have sub-topics that allow me to narrow down to a manageable list size of just books on a specific niche topic?

Your thoughts on reworking the search index are interesting too. I’m contemplating tweaking a shareware search engine on one of my sites to reduce the size of the index. My first thought was to not index common words – but which words are most common, and are they truly unimportant? I’ll try to figure out a way to count the individual words in my index to see if some can be thrown away, or if they’re important and need to be kept. I’ll also have to make sure I ingore the same words in user searches that I ignored when building the index; so searches like “The History of Science” won’t return no results if my index doesn’t include the words “the” or “of”, but does contain “History” or “Science”.

By: Maria

Maria — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:59:58 +0000

Thanks for all the hard work you’re putting in to make the site better. Oddly enough, I just tried the search feature about 30 minutes ago and was very disappointed with the results. For example, searching for P.D. James brought up page after page of books for authors named “James” (first or last name). I paged through for a while, but soon got fed up. P was still pretty far off.

I just tried it again without the periods (in other words PD James) and it worked much better. I guess I need to know the tricks of using search.