Grumpety-grump...
Jun. 13th, 2011 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfMore complaining about the library catalog:
Of course, you can combine search terms (and categories) too - theoretically. However, the results seem strangely useless, a lot of the time. In fact, even just a basic search without any bells and whistles - just two terms in the main search window - will render bizarrely inconsistent results. I've gotten, in the last couple of hours, staggeringly different results list for repeated searches *for the same two search terms*. The number of results varied - and I really can't comprehend how this is possible, it completely does my head in - between 69 and 6667.
Then, when I tried to narrow it down by telling the catalog search function to search only for English books, I got something like 20,000(!!!) 'results', starting with books from the 1700s and written in a baroque version of German. How that can be the result of narrowing down a search for a combination of two English search terms to just English-language results - well, it completely baffles me. (For that matter, it also baffles me how the original search for those two English terms rendered so many results in Czech and Russian.)
I am not usually too stupid to use search engines and search functions, honestly. In fact, I'm usually quite good at it.
(Oh, btw: while I was typing this entry, Windows 7 - or Firefox? - zoomed in and out three times, locked my cursor once, and jumped me to a different tab a couple of times. But those are things I barely notice anymore - I'm happy as long as the window I'm working in doesn't close before I could post...)
Of course, you can combine search terms (and categories) too - theoretically. However, the results seem strangely useless, a lot of the time. In fact, even just a basic search without any bells and whistles - just two terms in the main search window - will render bizarrely inconsistent results. I've gotten, in the last couple of hours, staggeringly different results list for repeated searches *for the same two search terms*. The number of results varied - and I really can't comprehend how this is possible, it completely does my head in - between 69 and 6667.
Then, when I tried to narrow it down by telling the catalog search function to search only for English books, I got something like 20,000(!!!) 'results', starting with books from the 1700s and written in a baroque version of German. How that can be the result of narrowing down a search for a combination of two English search terms to just English-language results - well, it completely baffles me. (For that matter, it also baffles me how the original search for those two English terms rendered so many results in Czech and Russian.)
I am not usually too stupid to use search engines and search functions, honestly. In fact, I'm usually quite good at it.
(Oh, btw: while I was typing this entry, Windows 7 - or Firefox? - zoomed in and out three times, locked my cursor once, and jumped me to a different tab a couple of times. But those are things I barely notice anymore - I'm happy as long as the window I'm working in doesn't close before I could post...)
