Announcement: New E-commerce Product Search Engine Implementation

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Comments

  • Nate Merritt (Logos)
    Nate Merritt (Logos) Member, Logos Employee Posts: 28

    Don Awalt said:

    The overwhelming response here is that the old search was better, albeit with some issues.

    Thank you for your patience while we looked into this.  The majority of customers, who only type in a text search into the search box with default filters or possibly with the "Unowned" filter, were getting a better search experience while many of you here in this thread were getting a worse experience, especially when applying many filters or sorts and when using the "Unowned" filter.  It took us some time to realize the extent of the degradation of your search experience.

    A common theme here in this forums thread is long-time users with very heavy product ownership.  We absolutely appreciate you as customers and want to give you the best search experience possible.  Doing so requires handling the edge case of your unique ownership profile which is a small percentage of the total customer base.  When shipping new features we create automated tests with heavy ownership and also do manual testing in order to ensure that our features work for all users, especially long-time users who are heavily invested into Logos.

    Unfortunately in our internal testing in the past several months we did not notice the problems with the "Unowned" filter related to the 1,000 limit, such as not seeing expected results when applying additional filters.  This was despite testing internally with Logos accounts with heavy ownership.  Searches with the default "All" ownership filter (instead of "Unowned") did not exhibit this problem.  Furthermore, the issue wasn't with the products returned by the search not matching the filter but rather that expected products weren't returned at all.  This was much harder to detect.  Your significant knowledge of our product catalog was very important in tracking this down; the post mentioning the 1,000 product count limit when paging was especially helpful in determining the cause of the issue.  Thank you all for your posts.

    If you still have issues with not seeing expected products when the "Unowned" filter is applied (alone or in conjunction with other filters) please let us know.

    We hope to have a fix for the Progress sort shipped soon and plan to address the other issues raised in this thread in the coming weeks.

  • Graham Criddle
    Graham Criddle MVP Posts: 33,252

    If you still have issues with not seeing expected products when the "Unowned" filter is applied (alone or in conjunction with other filters) please let us know.

    It's still not working for me

  • Rosie Perera
    Rosie Perera Member Posts: 26,194 ✭✭✭✭✭

    scooter said:

    Re in quotes:  Was this best practise weeks ago, or is it only now with the new search function??

    Ideally, it should work perfectly well without quotes.  SIBKIS: see it big, keep it simple.  Quotation marks complicate things, + show a lack of thought for the customer.

    I'm pretty sure this has always been the case. It's like doing searches in Logos or on Google. Doing it without quotes says you are searching for all results that include Word1 AND Word2 AND Word3. Searching with the quotes says you are searching for all results that have those three words in that particular order and it leaves out all the results that happen to have all those words in them. It is really helpful for refining your searches.

    In the case of long titles it's probably irrelevant, since if you AND that many words together you are going to probably end up with only the book you're looking for.

    But if you are looking for a short title with very common words that might appear in other titles too, it can be helpful to specify that you want just this phrase. This is especially true if one of the words is a little word like "of" that is in TONS of results.

    Actually, it might be that the new search does a better job of making the relevance of results that have these words in the order you typed them appear near the top of the list of hits than others, but it still returns a huge number of results when you don't include the quotes.

    For example:

    image

    Or maybe the old search did a halfway decent job of that too and I'd never noticed it, because I always use quotes when I'm searching for a phrase (in Google and Logos) as a matter of habit, a well-worn best practice.

  • Rosie Perera
    Rosie Perera Member Posts: 26,194 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Thank you for your patience while we looked into this.  The majority of customers, who only type in a text search into the search box with default filters or possibly with the "Unowned" filter, were getting a better search experience while many of you here in this thread were getting a worse experience, especially when applying many filters or sorts and when using the "Unowned" filter.  It took us some time to realize the extent of the degradation of your search experience.

    A common theme here in this forums thread is long-time users with very heavy product ownership.  We absolutely appreciate you as customers and want to give you the best search experience possible.  Doing so requires handling the edge case of your unique ownership profile which is a small percentage of the total customer base. 

    Thanks, Nate. 

    One thing I used to do regularly, every week or so, was peruse the store for new books I might want to acquire for my library. I'm much less likely to want to do that with the store the way it is.

    I like to look, for example, at my favorite publishers to see what else they have that I don't own yet that I might be interested in, and then to see if they might be available as part of a package (ideally with dynamic pricing) that might make them a better deal.

    I like to Browse All Books and sort by Newest and filter on Unowned, again to see if I've missed any recent good ones.

    One thing I've always wished the store could do is filter out certain categories, not just filter to only include certain categories. For example, I wish I could weed out all the Mobile Ed and fiction.

  • Steve Adams
    Steve Adams Member Posts: 47 ✭✭

    The team has been focused on the 1,000 result limit, as this seems to be the largest issue raised here. After continued digging and testing we were able to find a way to raise the limit from 1,000 to 20,000 which is the system maximum. We expect this greatly improves your ability to discover unowned products. 

    We greatly appreciate your continued feedback, and are continuing to work to improve your search experience. 

    Thanks for your work. I can see the 20,000 limit in operation now. That is how many results are offerred if I sort by "Price (lowest first)" without applying any filters. However, as soon as I add "Unowned", the number of results drops to around 200. It changes a bit as I add other filters like "English", "Live" and so on, but never significantly. "Unowned" & "Commentaries" with default sorting returns 226 items, but does not include ones that I would expect to see.

    It appears that I already own 99% of what you regard as the most relevant 20,000 results for me. I don't own the remaining 1% because I've considered them previously and decided not to buy them. It is the less "relevant" products that I actually want to see, but cannot at the moment.

    Would it possible to make "Unowned" the default, rather than "All"? If that were evaluated before the results limit were to kick in, that would solve all the terrible problems other than the Progress order bug.

    Failing that, I presume that there is an external IP address that still serves the old page using the old database. Could you tell us what that is?

  • Joseph Turner
    Joseph Turner Member Posts: 2,872 ✭✭✭

    That said, I was able to quickly and simply resolve this specific issue. So, if you search what hte bible really says about God's heavenly host you'll find that you get your expected results. 

    Thanks!  I do wish that it would be able to figure out minor spelling variations on its own though.

    Disclaimer:  I hate using messaging, texting, and email for real communication.  If anything that I type to you seems like anything other than humble and respectful, then I have not done a good job typing my thoughts.

  • DMB
    DMB Member Posts: 14,392 ✭✭✭✭

    I really have a hard time believing their a/b tests ... and customer delivery.  But it's their puppy.

    I already knew the book author and title text. Just wanted the product page. Old search could have found all 8 quickly. New search had to bury the eight amongst almost 120 packages to scroll thru. Then, I had to personally count what it found ... who knows anymore?

    After the above, I got to thinking, there's likely a collection for the author (well known) .... used to be. I squinted at the 123 entries ... either the earlier collection is somewhere else. Or it's not.

    "If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.

  • Frank Sauer
    Frank Sauer Member Posts: 2,040 ✭✭✭✭

    Logos has been in business for 32 years. We have a LOT of systems that have been built in-house and have evolved over time, and our store is a big part of that. When we first started selling books online, we were one of the pioneers. Developing an in-house system was the only option!

    I can relate to this.... Thinking back to my IT days, getting Y2K compliant with a series of old COBOL (Z) based internal programs - the in house systems, especially if built through dated programming can be tedious to update.

    Logos 10 - OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Windows 11, Android 16 & Android 14

  • Paul Gibson
    Paul Gibson Member Posts: 134 ✭✭✭

    • Sort by Title is no longer supported

    Please bring this back. I wanted to sort by title today and was frustrated because it wasn't there.

  • Frank Sauer
    Frank Sauer Member Posts: 2,040 ✭✭✭✭

    Improved Forums functionality would be a bigger plus than website search and AI related projects for this user....

    Watch this space!

    Hopefully we won't have to watch for much longer....

    Also, hopefully at minimum the Forums are updated with full mobile device compatibility and the ability to "hide" forums and subforums that a user is not interested in viewing.

    Logos 10 - OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Windows 11, Android 16 & Android 14

  • NB.Mick
    NB.Mick MVP Posts: 16,221

    Don Awalt said:

    The overwhelming response here is that the old search was better, albeit with some issues.

    Thank you for your patience while we looked into this.  The majority of customers, who only type in a text search into the search box with default filters or possibly with the "Unowned" filter, were getting a better search experience

    Sorry Nate, but I'm not buying it. I haven't seen one example of that. By chance I typed in a text search into the search box this morning. A forum thread suggested works by Karl Keating, indicating Logos only carries a few. So I looked in the store, just like anyone might do, no defaults changed, no ownership selection, no filters, no specific sort order applied:

    image

    • The engine redirected me to James Keating, ignoring that Karl Keating is a valid, right-spelled, existing author in the Logos store (red box and arrow). A novice user would believe the algorithm and learn that Logos doesn't carry works by Karl Keating at all, go away and spend their money elsewhere. This is unacceptable.

    • It even gets worse: Helpfully the engine now proposed to me six (!) base packages and collections I mostly already own but where James Keating is only the tiniest fraction of the content (starting with the two in the golden box). The seventh entry in the results list is actually a book by James Keating. Even if somehone had misspelled Karl for James, do you really expect them to scroll down a long list of large boxes of spurious collections for hundreds or thousands of dollars - in a list claiming to be ordered by Relevance! - until reaching an actual book? Again, the novice user would believe the algorithm halfway down the page and learn that Logos doesn't carry individual works by James Keating at all, go away and spend their money elsewhere. This again is unacceptable.

    • Actually 18 of the 20 results for James Keating are collections, since there are only two books in the store by James Keating - which is exactly the same number of individual books existing from Karl Keating, which reflects back to the first bullet. What is this algorithm doing? If the first name really was a misspelling (if a bad algorithm was cutting the tail at authors with only two books on their name), why offer an equally obscure author and not offer Thomas Keating, or Daniel Keating who have 8 resp 6 books in the library? Even if a bad design would opt for offering more prolific authors rather than exact matches for obscure ones, this is badly implemented.

    The first two bullets are example cases where the new shop search will lose you money and lead the users away who you claim you are targeting with the new engine. Those users are unlikely to complain in the forums (maybe that's the reason you didn't beta-test the feature with actual users). Somewhere it said you tested by switching some users to the new engine while keeping others on the old - please make this switch customizable and give me an opt-in for the old engine. I'd offer to pay for it in a small subscription, but you probably will get more of my money anyway if you either throw out or fix the new search engine.

    NB: getting 20k instead of 1k results is probably much better (I don't see that change, it's still 318 unowned books for me), but is no fix for filters that rely on sort order, and no fix for basic functionality that just isn't there, like finding an author or sorting within the results list. If you are locked in to that wonderful new ecommerce engine, you need to talk to their devs to get this into working state. 

      

    Have joy in the Lord! Smile

  • scooter
    scooter Member Posts: 1,206 ✭✭✭

    NB.Mick said:

    Sorry Nate, but I'm not buying it.

    Mick, I really appreciate you showing Nate + Logos what a monster this search is.  I find there is a partial tendency for people with the star to not speak up; I am so glad you are doing so here.

    I figure starred people would be more carefully listened to by L people, so need to tell L when things simply don't cut it.

    I searched by title yesterday.  Now say the title is 'Abba Dabba Doo.'  Conclusions below are generalized from searching for 6 different titles.

                         :All titles exist in L, found beforehand.  No title started with 'A' or 'The.'

    I put in Abba only.  Results are poor.  Book doesn't appear in top 30, or is 6-12 down.  Often books title 'The Abba...' came before.  Often books with Abba as the 2nd, 4th or 6th word in the title came before.  The Search Killer slotted in collections before Abba.

    I then put in Abba Dabba.  Here results were better.  Sometimes the book I wanted was 1st, sometimes 3rd to 6th.  I say results are not good                       enough.  I want all books Abba Dabba 1st.  Then I want The Abba Dabba second. Then I want Wow: the Life and Times of Abba Dabba Doo last......Even in this scenario these Wow type books were ahead of Abba Dabba upon occasion.

    If telephone books can do this, so can Logos.

    Please fix the Search Killer so we have a killer Search.  Thank you.

  • DMB
    DMB Member Posts: 14,392 ✭✭✭✭

    scooter said:

    Please fix the Search Killer so we have a killer Search.  Thank you.

    Say hello to Fred! And was it Thelma?

    I got to thinking about this problem. It seems to me, the issue isn't the tiresome 'edge' cases (us, I guess), vs the normal searchers (good guys). Instead, it's trying to get a search engine that's optimized for classified 'stuff' (like Walmart), to handle the product structure Faithlife developed. I'm guessing us 'edgers' are going to be on our own. 

    - They (PE guys) need to deliver, and neato tools for Faithlife are part of the equation

    - Even if they twist this tool to get it to sort of work, the next profit iteration (search optimizing) will again fail.

    We're on our own in this lost Logosian world (lost books).

    "If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.

  • scooter
    scooter Member Posts: 1,206 ✭✭✭

    Stone Age.  Stonehenge.  It's close to unhinged to put out something that works this poorly.

    I think I do normal searches.  

    DMB said:

    It seems to me, the issue isn't the tiresome 'edge' cases (us, I guess),

    I believe I want to buy normal Reformed stuff, but maybe I'm an edge case.

    If I may: the following.  You are what I call a specialist re the stuff you upon occasion mention on here.  Everything you need should be easy to find; L should cater to you.  

    10,000 + other specialists: their books SB easy to find, as well.  

    Catering to everyone auto. includes catering to specialists. In the end, everyone's needs add up to business success.

    xxxxxxxxxxxx

    I worked for a place that wanted a new inventory mgt system.  They sent the team out to a few places, then bought one.

    Installed, it took 1 week to get the 1st skid out.  Got so maybe 1 skid went a day.  Took 2 months to get it right.

    The day shipper made $95 000 that year [double regular]. sitting on overtime waiting for a skid.  He took his family on holidays to a beach + put 10 grand extra into giving his ride more street cred.

    The mgr was fired.  Mgt's seeming ability took a big hit.  This mess was the talk of Little Village Workspace for a very long time.  I got to praying for this system to get up + run well.  

  • NichtnurBibelleser
    NichtnurBibelleser Member Posts: 558 ✭✭✭

    Is there any chance of getting back the “sort by dynamic price”?

    This brought me into buying a lot of stuff; it’s absence may yield the opposite result.

  • Steve Adams
    Steve Adams Member Posts: 47 ✭✭

    I agree that the relevance sorting has improved.

    Following NB.Mick's post above, I feel the need to explain my statement in the quote above.

    Relevance sorting has improved, in the sense that when fiction titles (which I don't care for) match my search, they are sorted at the end where they belong.

    Relevance to the search string has not improved. However, that is a side-effect of the (now) 20,000 product limit. If my search string is only evaluated against the first 20,000 products, so the most relevant products to what I'm searching for are not returned at all.

    All, We can get a better seach experience at the moment by using Google:

    [quote]site:logos.com/product "Karl Keating"

  • NB.Mick
    NB.Mick MVP Posts: 16,221

    All, We can get a better seach experience at the moment by using Google:

    [quote]site:logos.com/product "Karl Keating"

    Great idea, thanks!

    In fact the library search (Add to library) still works great with title or author searches.  

    Have joy in the Lord! Smile

  • Michael Fisher
    Michael Fisher Member, Logos Employee Posts: 7

    NB.Mick said:

    • The engine redirected me to James Keating, ignoring that Karl Keating is a valid, right-spelled, existing author in the Logos store (red box and arrow). 

    We are aware of this issue and working to resolve it. It is also worth noting that this issue is the result of a feature, distinct from search, that works alongside search to automatically apply an author filter. 

    NB.Mick said:

    NB: getting 20k instead of 1k results is probably much better (I don't see that change, it's still 318 unowned books for me), but is no fix for filters that rely on sort order, and no fix for basic functionality that just isn't there, like finding an author or sorting within the results list. If you are locked in to that wonderful new ecommerce engine, you need to talk to their devs to get this into working state. 

    We are continuing to work on improving results, with special attention being paid to issues with the unowned filter. 

  • Steve Adams
    Steve Adams Member Posts: 47 ✭✭

    We are continuing to work on improving results, with special attention being paid to issues with the unowned filter.

    Would it be possible to make "Unowned" the default, rather than "All"? If you can apply that filter first, we would only be left with relatively minor bugs.

  • Rosie Perera
    Rosie Perera Member Posts: 26,194 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Another bug: I think this worked fine in the old store:

    Search for "Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible" -- no results

    image

    But this book does exist in the Logos store. It is spelled with an & instead of "and" but those two should be treated as equivalent for searches.

    https://www.logos.com/product/311046/sinai-and-zion-an-entry-into-the-jewish-bible 

    image
    How did I happen to stumble upon this? The title is spelled "Sinai and Zion" in the Feedbear request for this book, which came from the fact that it was spelled that way in the Amazon listing.

  • Rosie Perera
    Rosie Perera Member Posts: 26,194 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Another bug: a weird mismatch in the way author names are matched/found:

    Typing this author's name in quotes without his middle initial matches only one of the books by him (with the middle initial in its author field).

    image

    When you add the middle initial, it finds four books by him, including the above (and various collections that those appear in).

    image

    Strangely, the one book it found that appears to be by a different author (Jacob Neusner) actually does include Jon Levenson as one of the contributors, though his name is spelled without the middle initial in the "Authors" list under "Product Details". However it's spelled with the middle initial in the product description, so maybe it's picking it up there.

    image

    Anyway, the old store used to be able to match authors' names with or without the middle initial equivalently. And the Library can too (though in this case, in the Library, if you type it without the middle initial, it does *not* match that book edited by Jacob Neusner. This might be a separate issue.

  • NB.Mick
    NB.Mick MVP Posts: 16,221

    the old store used to be able to match authors' names with or without the middle initial equivalently.

    Actually I don't think so - Irving Jensen vs. Irving J. Jensen wasn't working until the author name was fixed.  

    Have joy in the Lord! Smile

  • Steve Adams
    Steve Adams Member Posts: 47 ✭✭

    It looks like the progress order bug might be fixed!

  • Rosie Perera
    Rosie Perera Member Posts: 26,194 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Another thing I wish the store search engine could do is filter between books that are actually by a particular author vs. ones where that person merely wrote the foreword. It's so annoying looking for books by an author to be faced with dozens of books you have to filter through which they didn't actually write. 

    For example, Rowan Williams. He wrote the forewords to tons of books, so the search shows 74 hits. Ignoring the 36 packages/bundles (I still hate that they're up at the top of the search results), and the 2 collections of Rowan Williamses books, there are still 36 books, only 21 of which are actually by Rowan Williams (or with him as an actual co-author, not merely the foreword).

    https://www.logos.com/search?filters=author-14389_Author 

    I'm guessing the data comes over from the automated feed with whoever wrote the foreword listed as an author too (as it shows that way on Amazon), but if there's any chance you can differentiate, please do!

  • scooter
    scooter Member Posts: 1,206 ✭✭✭

    Another thing I wish the store search engine could do is filter between books that are actually by a particular author vs. ones where that person merely wrote the foreword

    Looking at product pages, where 2 authors are listed, I often times see on closer inspection that one will have written the book, the other the forward.

    I figure  the forward person will show as an author in your search.

    Now, I have not tested for this, but it is a possibility.

  • Rosie Perera
    Rosie Perera Member Posts: 26,194 ✭✭✭✭✭

    scooter said:

    Another thing I wish the store search engine could do is filter between books that are actually by a particular author vs. ones where that person merely wrote the foreword

    Looking at product pages, where 2 authors are listed, I often times see on closer inspection that one will have written the book, the other the forward.

    I figure  the forward person will show as an author in your search.

    Now, I have not tested for this, but it is a possibility.

    No, that is the opposite of what my point was. I generally don't give a rip about who wrote the foreword. I want to only find books that a given author actually wrote. I want the search to leave out the ones that they only wrote the foreword for.

    Unfortunately, the way it currently works, the person who wrote the foreword does show up in searches. Yes, there might be rare times when I want to see everything that a particular author wrote, including forewords, but it's not likely that I would buy a book just because it has a foreword by some author I like.

  • scooter
    scooter Member Posts: 1,206 ✭✭✭

    Unfortunately, the way it currently works, the person who wrote the foreword does show up in searches

    This is my point, Rosie.  We are making the same point.

    There is little effort to produce product pages using the same procedure.

    Some books apparently have no authors.  Some preface writers are apparently co-authors.  There is less effort than there SB in giving us samples.  Books in series are sometimes not connected to their series.  Authors' bios are hit and miss; as in, who is this new author?, or, cannot L copy and paste the bio from a previous book?  This smacks of management indifference.

    I have worked this for a long time to little avail.  

  • Steve Adams
    Steve Adams Member Posts: 47 ✭✭

    Hi Logos people,

    Could we please have an update on this? I do most of my buying early in the month, and I'd really like to be able to use the "Unowned" filter and still get reliable results.

    Thanks, Steve

  • Paul
    Paul Member Posts: 45 ✭✭

    Yes, an update would be very nice. Search results result in more ads than a Google search.

    Based on another thread, I was curious if there were other John Owen books I did not own. I did a search for john owen and filtered by unowned and sorted by relevance. The first 8 results were collections, It wasn't until the 10th result that I actually had a book authored by John Owen.

    After that one result, the second result that is not a collection is another 7 down the list. The 8th is also a book (thankfully).

    When I search for an author, I think works by that author should prioritized instead of bulk collections. I shouldn't have to do so much searching on search results.

  • Terry Thompson
    Terry Thompson Member Posts: 7 ✭✭

    Hi Nate Merritt (Logos) and leaders of Logos,

    I have recently noticed the resource counts on the website are missing. I'm hoping it's just a temporary bug in the system that can be easily and quickly fixed.


    When I go to the Browse Books catalog of resources on the logos.com website, I used to be able to see how many resources were in my search and I could expand or narrow from there. I used the feature to determine what percentage of all books in the catalog I owned based on the search. It was helpful for me to identify blindspots in my library and fill in the holes. I found this exceptionally useful when trying to identify resources I didn't own but wanted to purchase - I'm a fairly large purchaser of resources. That being said, I have found the last two or three times I have gone to the catalog without the ability to size the search, I have felt defeated and just closed the page. I just gave up on trying to make a purchase. I know there is more I'd probably like to purchase but without the # of resources identified on the catalog page, I am finding engaging with the catalog to be very difficult and defeating.

    Are there plans to restore this functionality on the Logos.com website? I certainly would appreciate it if you would. I'm afraid without that functionality, my curiosity to explore is overwhelmed with the inability to be able to assess and size my searches.  


    Please respond and let me know your intentions. I'm hoping it's just a temporary bug in the system that can be easily and quickly fixed.



    If I should be asking this somewhere else, please tell me. I'm just hoping someone will answer. Again, I hope it's just a temporary bug that can be easily and quickly fixed.

  • Manuel R.
    Manuel R. Member Posts: 368 ✭✭✭

    I came here to say the same thing as Terry above me => Seconded!

    But as I read the thread and Mark mentioned the new search engine Algolia: Some months ago we also had a comparison between this search engine and our custom Apache Solr / Elasticsearch / OpenSearch.

    So Algolia might be tempting to get a new solution on the street in a very short time and looks really promising you have at least two problems (especially in comparison to a self hosted open source search engine):

    1. You are locked in, into a cloud hosted search that you are completely dependent upon. In regard to availability and costs.

    2. You are limited to the options and methods they offer or discontinue at any point.

    For the sake of the Logos customers and their money that is used for a cloud provider:

    A custom implemented solution based on an open source search engine for example with Lucene as a base and Solr or Elasticsearch as a wrapper is much more sustainable and cost-effective in the long run.

    See this post by Doug Turnbull: https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2016/06/01/thoughts-on-algolia/

    and his book: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/relevant-search/9781617292774/

    We also do use Apache Solr with our sermon website and are really happy with all the possibilites, performance and facets!
    (And you will find developers that are accustomed to those open source search engines, so no problem with wild inhouse developments but still enough freedom to tweak according to your own or better the customers wishes)

  • Steve Adams
    Steve Adams Member Posts: 47 ✭✭

    I have recently noticed the resource counts on the website are missing. I'm hoping it's just a temporary bug in the system that can be easily and quickly fixed.

    Unfortunately, the absence of resource counts is their "fix". It makes it harder for people to see that the search is unreliable.

    Manuel R. said:

    A custom implemented solution based on an open source search engine for example with Lucene as a base and Solr or Elasticsearch as a wrapper is much more sustainable and cost-effective in the long run.

    I think that Logos have placed a premium on relevance, hoping to increase sales. Presumably, that is working, because they don't seem to care that they have lost a lot of goodwill from long-term customers with large libraries.

    Thanks for your input. I'm sure they will read it, but I don't expect a reply - not even to someone with relevant technical expertise. The Logos staff seem to have been instructed to not respond to complaints about the search. [:#]

  • DMB
    DMB Member Posts: 14,392 ✭✭✭✭

    Manuel R. said:

    But as I read the thread and Mark mentioned the new search engine Algolia: Some months ago we also had a comparison between this search engine and our custom Apache Solr / Elasticsearch / OpenSearch.

    Interesting comments/experience. Thank you. Having 'watched', I'm wondering if they don't have a plan-B ... usually an influencial voice is in play.

    "If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.

  • DMB
    DMB Member Posts: 14,392 ✭✭✭✭

    I think that Logos have placed a premium on relevance, hoping to increase sales. Presumably, that is working, because they don't seem to care that they have lost a lot of goodwill from long-term customers with large libraries.

    I think you're right (and core purchasers as 'edge cases').

    This week I wanted to see if I had all the Writings of the Ancient World. Series name in quotes brought up the complete collection; no singles. Removing the quotes brought up the kitchen sink ... no relevance to the text phrase at all. 

    Each 'fail' points to limitations in what FL signed on to. Edge case, or not.

    "If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.

  • DMB
    DMB Member Posts: 14,392 ✭✭✭✭

    I keep wondering about their 3rd party partner. Features what I own. Duplicates it. But at least, then leads with unowned.

    "If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.

  • Manuel R.
    Manuel R. Member Posts: 368 ✭✭✭

    I think that Logos have placed a premium on relevance, hoping to increase sales. Presumably, that is working, because they don't seem to care that they have lost a lot of goodwill from long-term customers with large libraries.

    I can image that my suggestion was already the existing search engine. Because there are not that much viable possibilities on the market (Though they use a pretty obscure local search engine for the Logos desktop app).

    But I think the result and facet count is not only relevant for long-term customers but also for new customers. Also and especially the filter and facet count.

    I have to concede those are pretty complex and time intensive filter and facetting-operations. In my hobby project we also want to show single results from a series only one time and I don't have a good solution yet, where you still get a correct result count.

    And may I hint at the library search in the Logos Desktop App "Add to library"-tab is also still working with result counts and filter and facet counts. So there is still such a search (of course without price and packages).

  • Manuel R.
    Manuel R. Member Posts: 368 ✭✭✭

    Manuel R. said:

    I can imagine that my suggestion was already the existing search engine. Because there are not that much viable possibilities on the market (Though they use a pretty obscure local search engine for the Logos desktop app).

    Ok, I have to correct it. It is a pretty cool text database search engine: Emdros ( https://emdros.orghttps://github.com/Faithlife/emdros  ) probably in combination with SQLite ( https://github.com/Faithlife/System.Data.SQLite )