I Don’t Understand TPL’s Search Algorithm
December 6th, 2010
Search for the title How Bad Are Bananas? at the Toronto Public Library, and you get two hits: some musical scores from the 1920s, and The complete Sarah Vaughan on Mercury. Er, what?
To be fair, the first hit contains songs that, collectively, have the words “how”, “bad”, “are”, and “bananas” whilst the second (less good) match contains “how”, “bad”, “are”, and “banana”.
Just to let you know that TPL’s Web Team is aware of issues with the search function and is working to solve them. The search indexes all words entered and as such picks up words included in the details of the record that you don’t see on the results page. If you are searching for a specific title, try using quotation marks in order to narrow it down a bit better. In this case you would get no results which at least is more accurate than seemingly irrelevant titles. We appreciate the example.
Thanks,
Margot