Idea for adding search tags functionality

[GeoffR]

I had an idea how to add the ability to search for tags/keywords as a way to get around Kobo's slow collections implementation. (I don't use collections myself, I usually just use the search function to find the book directly, or to get a list of all books by an author or series, so the following is just from what I have seen others posting about the speed of collections.)

The search function operates on the title, author, series, and subtitle fields, and it appears to be very fast. I have 650+ books on my Glo and if I search for "k" it takes only a second to build and display a list of 287 books containing the letter "k" in one of those four fields. In theory if I added these 287 books to a collection called "k" then it should be even faster to display that collection (since it only has to search one field). I haven't tried this, but I gather from what others have posted that it would probably take longer than 1 second to display a collection of 287 books.

The subtitle field seems pretty much useless. The subtitle just gets added to the end of the title, so if I wanted a subtitle I could just include it in the title and get exactly the same effect.

So the idea is to somehow disable the display of the subtitle (firmware patch), and add a feature to Calibre to insert the book's tags into the subtitle field in the form t::<tag name>. Then if I had tags such as t::fantasy and t::mystery for example, entering "t::" into the search bar would bring up a pick list of all my tags, and performing the search for say "t::fantasy" would bring up a list of all books with the t::fantasy tag.

My questions are: Would this work? If so, would it be faster than collections? And if so, would it be more useful than having subtitles?

[davidfor]

Interesting idea. And my first reaction was that it would work. But, I did some playing and I'm not as sure.

The problem is search results. I made a quick change to the utilities plugin to add the tags as the subtitle. The following are four of the values set:

t::Science Fiction t::Fantasy
t::Science Fiction
t::Science Fiction t::Young Adult t::Fantasy
t::Science Fiction t::Action & Adventure

When I searched for "t::science", the initial results list showed all of the above. If I selected "t::Science Fiction", I got all the books that had that as part of the subtitle. That worked nicely.

It worked because I had a book that "Science Fiction" as its only tag. Searching for "Fantasy" didn't work as well. I don't have any books that have "Fantasy" as their only tag. When the initial search results comes back, there isn't an entry I can select to display all the books with "Fantasy" as a tag. I have to press the "Go" button down the bottom to do that search. That still works, but it might not be as good.

One other thing, while doing the searches I found that the colon isn't a good separator. I had to change keyboards to use it.

Geoff: I have sent you a PM.

[GeoffR]

You're right of course, the search pick list isn't going to be very useful. While "t::" is not a good tag prefix for the keyboard, perhaps "@" would work well, as in @fantasy, @crime, etc.

I realised though that there is are no sort options on the list of search results, they are only sorted by title. That isn't a problem when I am searching by author or series because the results are usually all by the same author, but sort options are an advantage for collections.

Thanks!

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

You're right of course, the search pick list isn't going to be very useful. While "t::" is not a good tag prefix for the keyboard, perhaps "@" would work well, as in @fantasy, @crime, etc.

Yes, "@" works and I think it looks better. An alternative would be "#".

I realised though that there is are no sort options on the list of search results, they are only sorted by title. That isn't a problem when I am searching by author or series because the results are usually all by the same author, but sort options are an advantage for collections.

Sorting or filtering the results like the book list would be good.