Search

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[edit] Types of search on LibraryThing

There are 3 main search venues for book-related information on LibraryThing:

• Site-wide search: searching across the whole site for books, authors, ISBN, tags, etc.
• Catalog search: searching within a particular member's catalog for books, authors, tags, etc.
• Common Knowledge search: searching within the global, user-provided Common Knowledge data for various information.

Each of these methods has access to different sets of data and uses specialized search engines tuned to give the best performance for that particular data.

You can also search for other users and search for groups, using the Search tab.

[edit] Site-wide Search

How do I execute a site-wide search to find a particular book, author, or tag page?

• Use the Search tab in the top navigation bar to go to the site-wide Search page.
• If you are searching for a particular book then enter the title, author, or ISBN in the Works area.
• If you are searching for a particular author then enter the author's name in the Author area.
• If you are searching for information about items that use a particular tag then enter the tag in the Tags area.
• You can also search Talk messages, Groups, the global member list, user locations, or "Also On" sites (not all members fill out this optional profile information).

[edit] Catalog Search

[edit] How do I search a catalog for books, tags, comments?

• You may search within a catalog from one of two places:
  • The global Search page (described above)
  • The search bar at the top of a member's catalog pages.

[edit] Catalog search syntax

• Catalog searches can contain special modifiers that you can use to narrow your search. See the table below for a list of the modifiers and what they search.
• Negative searches are possible within a catalog using a minus/dash before the search term.
• You may search for quoted text to match a block of text exactly.
• The wildcard * may be used to match anything.

[edit] Sample searches

[edit] Acceptable modifier prefixes

* private comments are only searchable within your own catalog. That's why they're private.
** awaiting release

[edit] What if the search is returning the wrong results and I know they are the wrong results?

This is most often because the search index for your catalog is somehow not up to date. The good news is that you can correct this any time you want by clicking here to index your catalog for search. This will rebuild the index for your catalog. If you are still getting inconsistent results then try posting a question about it on the Bug Collectors group.

[edit] What about non-Latin character sets like Japanese characters?

We are still working through some small issues with multibyte Unicode character sets. Until we get them working perfectly you can put quotes around your search like this: "辞典".

[edit] Common Knowledge Search

Common Knowledge is often referred to simply as CK.

[edit] Accessing CK search

There are two main ways to search CK data. The most general is accessed via the link at the foot of every page on LibraryThing called Common Knowledge, which takes you to this page. At the top of that page is a simple search interface, explained in the next section.

The second way to search CK is via any page which displays CK data - a work page or an author page, for instance. All CK data is linked. Thus, if you are viewing an author page where the author's date of birth is entered in the CK section, clicking on that field shows you all other authors with the same date of birth.

[edit] General CK search

The search box at the top right of the CK page allows you to search either a single CK field (such as Agent or Nationality) or all fields. Use the left-hand box to enter what you want to search for, and the right-hand drop-down list to choose which field to search. All fields searches all CK fields. The very last option - username - allows you to search not the data itself, but its creators. Putting timspalding in the search box and choosing Username as the search field finds all CK data entered by LibraryThing's founder, for instance.

[edit] Known Problems

CK search isn't perfect. We should list some problems here.