BookSense.com Announces New, Improved Search Engine

This week, BookSense.com announced the launch of a redesigned BookSense.com search engine that is expected to significantly increase the relevancy of consumers' search results. "The new search has been improved in a number of ways and will provide more consistent results in terms of speed and stability," said BookSense.com Director Len Vlahos. "In addition, the new search engine will cause less strain on the system."

Vlahos pointed out that, with the new design, new search results are ordered according to different logic. The old search used a complex scheme that matched the search term to the author and title fields in the database. It looked at data such as publication date, inventory status, and more to help sort the results.

The new search, however, creates a "score" for each title to match the search term, and more importantly, uses the entire history of Book Sense bestseller sales data to determine the relevance of the results returned. This data will be updated weekly with each new bestseller list.

"The new search results will do a much better job of presenting the consumer with the books he or she is most likely looking for," Vlahos explained, and noted that, previously, a search for a term like "kite" might have returned a list of results that had little relevance to the book the consumer was looking for. "In the new search, 'kite' returns Kite Runner first," he said.

Here is a look at some of the other improvements to the search engine:

1. The new search uses "stemming," which means it searches for terms that have the same linguistic root as the query term. For example, a search for "technology" will also bring up "technologies," though it will give it a lower ranking.
   
   
2. The old search did not return results if there were more than 15,000 matches. The new search has no such limitation.
   
   
3. The jacket image will display for all returned results (as opposed to showing images for only the top three results), if an image exists in the database.
   
   
4. Finally, a store's website administrator will have the option of excluding out-of-print, special order, coming soon, and/or not-yet-published titles from search results appearing on the website.

BookSense.com participants should direct questions about the search engine improvements to the BookSense.com customer service department at [email protected], or by phone at (800) 637- 0037, option 2.