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I use Goodreads as my main book tracker and reviewer. My impression is that Amazon bought it for whatever reason, and then ignored it. It seems like there's so

I use Goodreads as my main book tracker and reviewer. My impression is that Amazon bought it for whatever reason, and then ignored it. It seems like there's so much more potential to a social community around books than what Goodreads offers. The UI also never fails to disappoint. One of the core user features, searching for books, has all sorts of weird quirks. I'll use a very specific query that should guarantee a hit, and nothing comes up. Or, the book that I want will come up for a second, and right as I'm going to select it, the results completely change and the book I want has vanished.

a_bonobo 8y ago
The website search seems to not be tokenized, it seems to use the entire word only... so if there's a slight difference it won't find anything. The main thing I've noticed in Goodreads since they were bought is a strong focus on Kindle integration. The newer Kindles all have Goodreads integration, you can send notes etc. to the Goodreads profile, the site itself has changed very little (although Goodreads changed a lot of rules around the ability to delete user reviews if they focus too much on author behaviour around the time the Amazon purchase went through https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/09/23/is-good-reads-new-policy-really-censorship/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.356b12aa12ab https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/09/23/i... )
- Roritharr 8y ago
  What drives me nuts is that the Goodreads integration never made it to Germany. It's frustrating to manually carry over the data while the code is just sitting there behind a country flag.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Similarly, I find it frustrating that they also just never backported the integration to older models. I have two different kindles and 1) where notes/highlights are stored, and 2) reading status updates to two entirely different websites, one being Goodreads and the other being an older site that is increasingly hard to find in Amazon's sitemap labyrinth.
- psychometry 8y ago
  Feature-rich text search with elasticsearch is stupidly easy. It's a real shame.
  - byrnehollander 8y ago
    I haven’t found this to be exactly the case - I recently worked with an engineer for more than a month tuning Elasticsearch (which required non-trivial changes to our catalog service). (It also took a good amount of effort to coordinate these changes across devices.) Like Goodreads, we have a fairly constrained catalog and we probably get a similar amount of queries. The search results are now much, much better, but ES has a pretty poor edit distance / fuzziness algorithm so they still aren’t perfect.
    - saganus 8y ago
      I know that the tuning you made is probably very context-dependent, but could you elaborate a bit on what kind of things you tuned up? I am about to start using ES for a project and just knowing which kinds of things could be useful to tune would be helpful. Thanks!
      - byrnehollander 8y ago
        Sure thing! I'll see if we can make a blog post, but here are a bunch of things that jump out (I work at a company that sells tickets to live events, so our users search for 'live events' like sporting events / concerts and 'performers' like teams and musicians): - word order matters _a lot_. we did a lot of fiddling with the n-gram tokenzier (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-ngram-tokenizer.html https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...).. we ended up making word order matter a good amount (e.g., 'new york' vs 'york new' return very different results... considering them the same resulted in a lot of noise) - where the user is searching from is pretty important -- we would fetch the 25 best results and then boost (i.e., reorder) them based on the user's distance from the event venue or the sports team's home venue. we also experimented with fetching more and more results (up to 250) and then boosting from this larger result set. note that ES couldn't take location into account out of the box -- we had to manually boost on the ES output - we set up versioning with our autocomplete endpoint so we could more easily A/B test variants (highly recommend this) - we built a system so non-technical employees could create "synonyms." for example, "nyc" could expand to "New York City." we also worked with our data science team to get a list of bad queries that might need synonyms to improve them. (we also automatically triggered a real-time re-index on synonym creation) - we similarly had an "expectations" tool for bug reporting and finding patterns from common bugs - we had to add a bunch of other metadata / suffixes to our documents. for example, we might want to return a 1pm Yankees game on August 4 when someone queries "august yankees afternoon game". so we have to interpret the time and add the month to what's being queried. similarly, we want this event to return when someone queries 'nyc baseball', so we need to ensure the league/sport is associated with the event document - we also had to add "stop words" that we ignored when querying. these include 'game(s)', 'versus', 'concert(s)', 'tickets', etc - we have an internal definition of performer or event "popularity", and needed to normalize this so ES's "match score" made more sense. (we had limited success here) - their documentation describes fuzziness as: `fuzziness is interpreted as a Levenshtein Edit Distance — the number of one character changes that need to be made to one string to make it the same as another string` which is overly simplistic and really messy to override (we decided against it) - because we had two different entities in our results ('events' and 'performers'), we had to figure out how to compare different entities (it was generally easier to compare results within entities) based on what was returned, time to event, location of event, and home location of the performer. we also added additional entities / pages on an ad-hoc basis which further complicated things - we also needed to exclude low quality performers and events from our catalog (e.g., performers with no events, events with no tickets for sale) In addition to configuring ES, it was pretty difficult to settle on a KPI because it's not that easy to put searches in the context of the entire user session... we could see if a given query resulted in: the user clicking on a result, or no search results, or the user deleting everything in the box and starting over, but we had a hard time following the user and seeing if the click led to a purchase. Also, as a disclaimer, I didn't actually write any code for this project (I'm a product manager). But I did take a computational linguistics class in college and worked very closely with the developer :)
iamsomewalrus 8y ago
We can, and will do better in the areas you’ve mentioned. I’ve been bitten by that same search bug :-(. I’ll cut a ticket for that.
- veritas3241 8y ago
  Is there a public tracker for this?
  - iamsomewalrus 8y ago
    No, but we have a really responsive customer service team that watches the Goodreads feedback group very closely.
- RangerScience 8y ago
  Oh hey! I would like to use Goodreads, but I whenever I try to load the page (with JS enabled) I get stuck in some kind of weird automatic-login->login-fail loop. I can go hit the page and give you more details if you want.
veritas3241 8y ago
I noticed recently that the Android UI was updated and a lot of my frustrations have gone away. Primarily around updating my current progress and adding to different shelves seems wot work much better.
- iamsomewalrus 8y ago
  That’s good to hear! The underlying architecture project has been in motion for a few years. We’re excited that it’s out.
ryeguy_24 8y ago
We agree. My co-founder and I built helloreads.com to address the UI concern above. We never felt like Goodreads got the necessary UI upgrade it needed. http://www.helloreads.com http://www.helloreads.com
- always_good 8y ago
  Not sure what it would entail, but unlike Goodreads, your catalog didn't have Mexican books like "La insidiosa fatalidad de las cosas"[1] nor the Spanish version of books like "Harry Potter y el cáliz de fuego"[2]. IIRC you originally could add your own books to Goodreads which let you fill in the gaps. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1869210.La_insidiosa_fatalidad_de_las_cosas https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1869210.La_insidiosa_fat... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101558.Harry_Potter_y_el_C_liz_de_Fuego https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101558.Harry_Potter_y_el...
favorited 8y ago
Better integration with Audible (another Amazon property) seems like it would be a slam dunk. One of my largest frustrations with my audiobook habit is that there is no single source of truth for my to-read list. I need the books I'm interested in to be in an Audible wish list so I can get alerts when they're on sale, but then it's divorced from my currently-reading and completed indices in GR.
- sdoering 8y ago
  I'd second this. Not only the kindle integration but also audible. They could even tie in my order history for books. That would mostly create a good base of about 90% of my books in the last 10 years.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  While we're on the subject of Audible, and there are apparently Amazon employees listening; why can't I use Amazon gift cards to buy Audible credits?
  - megaman22 8y ago
    Or use Audible credits for the audio-book companion to Kindle books? For that matter, is there any device I can access the audio companions I've purchased for my books other than the mobile phone Kindle apps? Can't do it on the PC app, the web app, on my actual Kindle, or my Fire tablet.
djhworld 8y ago
I've always found the recommendations feature a bit rubbish as well, but recommendations are a hard problem so I'll cut them some slack
rdl 8y ago
I'm amazed that their iOS app runs shitty banner ads for stupid products. Seems entirely off-brand for an Amazon property.
wgyn 8y ago
I've been happily using LibraryThing for over a decade: https://www.librarything.com https://www.librarything.com. I've tried at various points to switch to Goodreads but always find myself back there. It looks and feels like a relic of Web 1.0, but that feels somehow appropriate for my book catalog.

a_bonobo 8y ago

The website search seems to not be tokenized, it seems to use the entire word only... so if there's a slight difference it won't find anything. The main thing I've noticed in Goodreads since they were bought is a strong focus on Kindle integration. The newer Kindles all have Goodreads integration, you can send notes etc. to the Goodreads profile, the site itself has changed very little (although Goodreads changed a lot of rules around the ability to delete user reviews if they focus too much on author behaviour around the time the Amazon purchase went through https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/09/23/is-good-reads-new-policy-really-censorship/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.356b12aa12ab https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/09/23/i... )

Roritharr 8y ago
What drives me nuts is that the Goodreads integration never made it to Germany. It's frustrating to manually carry over the data while the code is just sitting there behind a country flag.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Similarly, I find it frustrating that they also just never backported the integration to older models. I have two different kindles and 1) where notes/highlights are stored, and 2) reading status updates to two entirely different websites, one being Goodreads and the other being an older site that is increasingly hard to find in Amazon's sitemap labyrinth.
psychometry 8y ago
Feature-rich text search with elasticsearch is stupidly easy. It's a real shame.
- byrnehollander 8y ago
  I haven’t found this to be exactly the case - I recently worked with an engineer for more than a month tuning Elasticsearch (which required non-trivial changes to our catalog service). (It also took a good amount of effort to coordinate these changes across devices.) Like Goodreads, we have a fairly constrained catalog and we probably get a similar amount of queries. The search results are now much, much better, but ES has a pretty poor edit distance / fuzziness algorithm so they still aren’t perfect.
  - saganus 8y ago
    I know that the tuning you made is probably very context-dependent, but could you elaborate a bit on what kind of things you tuned up? I am about to start using ES for a project and just knowing which kinds of things could be useful to tune would be helpful. Thanks!
    - byrnehollander 8y ago
      Sure thing! I'll see if we can make a blog post, but here are a bunch of things that jump out (I work at a company that sells tickets to live events, so our users search for 'live events' like sporting events / concerts and 'performers' like teams and musicians): - word order matters _a lot_. we did a lot of fiddling with the n-gram tokenzier (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-ngram-tokenizer.html https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...).. we ended up making word order matter a good amount (e.g., 'new york' vs 'york new' return very different results... considering them the same resulted in a lot of noise) - where the user is searching from is pretty important -- we would fetch the 25 best results and then boost (i.e., reorder) them based on the user's distance from the event venue or the sports team's home venue. we also experimented with fetching more and more results (up to 250) and then boosting from this larger result set. note that ES couldn't take location into account out of the box -- we had to manually boost on the ES output - we set up versioning with our autocomplete endpoint so we could more easily A/B test variants (highly recommend this) - we built a system so non-technical employees could create "synonyms." for example, "nyc" could expand to "New York City." we also worked with our data science team to get a list of bad queries that might need synonyms to improve them. (we also automatically triggered a real-time re-index on synonym creation) - we similarly had an "expectations" tool for bug reporting and finding patterns from common bugs - we had to add a bunch of other metadata / suffixes to our documents. for example, we might want to return a 1pm Yankees game on August 4 when someone queries "august yankees afternoon game". so we have to interpret the time and add the month to what's being queried. similarly, we want this event to return when someone queries 'nyc baseball', so we need to ensure the league/sport is associated with the event document - we also had to add "stop words" that we ignored when querying. these include 'game(s)', 'versus', 'concert(s)', 'tickets', etc - we have an internal definition of performer or event "popularity", and needed to normalize this so ES's "match score" made more sense. (we had limited success here) - their documentation describes fuzziness as: `fuzziness is interpreted as a Levenshtein Edit Distance — the number of one character changes that need to be made to one string to make it the same as another string` which is overly simplistic and really messy to override (we decided against it) - because we had two different entities in our results ('events' and 'performers'), we had to figure out how to compare different entities (it was generally easier to compare results within entities) based on what was returned, time to event, location of event, and home location of the performer. we also added additional entities / pages on an ad-hoc basis which further complicated things - we also needed to exclude low quality performers and events from our catalog (e.g., performers with no events, events with no tickets for sale) In addition to configuring ES, it was pretty difficult to settle on a KPI because it's not that easy to put searches in the context of the entire user session... we could see if a given query resulted in: the user clicking on a result, or no search results, or the user deleting everything in the box and starting over, but we had a hard time following the user and seeing if the click led to a purchase. Also, as a disclaimer, I didn't actually write any code for this project (I'm a product manager). But I did take a computational linguistics class in college and worked very closely with the developer :)

iamsomewalrus 8y ago

We can, and will do better in the areas you’ve mentioned. I’ve been bitten by that same search bug :-(. I’ll cut a ticket for that.

veritas3241 8y ago
Is there a public tracker for this?
- iamsomewalrus 8y ago
  No, but we have a really responsive customer service team that watches the Goodreads feedback group very closely.
RangerScience 8y ago
Oh hey! I would like to use Goodreads, but I whenever I try to load the page (with JS enabled) I get stuck in some kind of weird automatic-login->login-fail loop. I can go hit the page and give you more details if you want.

veritas3241 8y ago

I noticed recently that the Android UI was updated and a lot of my frustrations have gone away. Primarily around updating my current progress and adding to different shelves seems wot work much better.

iamsomewalrus 8y ago
That’s good to hear! The underlying architecture project has been in motion for a few years. We’re excited that it’s out.

ryeguy_24 8y ago

We agree. My co-founder and I built helloreads.com to address the UI concern above. We never felt like Goodreads got the necessary UI upgrade it needed. http://www.helloreads.com http://www.helloreads.com

always_good 8y ago
Not sure what it would entail, but unlike Goodreads, your catalog didn't have Mexican books like "La insidiosa fatalidad de las cosas"[1] nor the Spanish version of books like "Harry Potter y el cáliz de fuego"[2]. IIRC you originally could add your own books to Goodreads which let you fill in the gaps. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1869210.La_insidiosa_fatalidad_de_las_cosas https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1869210.La_insidiosa_fat... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101558.Harry_Potter_y_el_C_liz_de_Fuego https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101558.Harry_Potter_y_el...

favorited 8y ago

Better integration with Audible (another Amazon property) seems like it would be a slam dunk. One of my largest frustrations with my audiobook habit is that there is no single source of truth for my to-read list. I need the books I'm interested in to be in an Audible wish list so I can get alerts when they're on sale, but then it's divorced from my currently-reading and completed indices in GR.

sdoering 8y ago
I'd second this. Not only the kindle integration but also audible. They could even tie in my order history for books. That would mostly create a good base of about 90% of my books in the last 10 years.
Zelphyr 8y ago
While we're on the subject of Audible, and there are apparently Amazon employees listening; why can't I use Amazon gift cards to buy Audible credits?
- megaman22 8y ago
  Or use Audible credits for the audio-book companion to Kindle books? For that matter, is there any device I can access the audio companions I've purchased for my books other than the mobile phone Kindle apps? Can't do it on the PC app, the web app, on my actual Kindle, or my Fire tablet.

djhworld 8y ago

I've always found the recommendations feature a bit rubbish as well, but recommendations are a hard problem so I'll cut them some slack

rdl 8y ago

I'm amazed that their iOS app runs shitty banner ads for stupid products. Seems entirely off-brand for an Amazon property.

wgyn 8y ago

I've been happily using LibraryThing for over a decade: https://www.librarything.com https://www.librarything.com. I've tried at various points to switch to Goodreads but always find myself back there. It looks and feels like a relic of Web 1.0, but that feels somehow appropriate for my book catalog.