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by ComputerGuru 5072 days ago
Your search is... awkward.

I'm searching for "Count of Monte Cristo" (no quotes), and I get barely-related results (starting from "The Pregnancy Countdown" to "Fifty Shades of Grey" - please tell me that "of" is a stop-word in your search algorithm!).

Sidebar: Is your review aggregation automated or curated?

EDIT

When a cover image is not available, the results are meaningless as you must hover over each coverless result to see the title. I think the text should be always visible for images with no cover:

http://imgur.com/uwnBB

2 comments

Agreed with the search being awkward. I tried searching "end of eternity" with and without quotes. In both cases, A Song of Ice and Fire as well as Fifty Shades of Gray came up [1]. I'm looking for a classic book by Isaac Asimov. For what it's worth, Amazon knows what I'm talking about immediately [2].

On top of the search algorithm being a little wonky, I think your sentiment analysis is a little off, as well. For example, for the book Caine's Law by Matthew Stover, you have the Two Pens and Kirkus reviews as negative, when in fact they were positive reviews.

I would love to see a site like this work--I'd be a constant user, but it's got some work to go before it's usable.

[1]: http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/search?q=%22end+of+eternity%...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=end%20of%20eternity

[3]: http://idreambooks.com/newbooks/232-Caine-s-Law

I think that's probably a bug. When the page first loads the results, the overlay w/ the title is visible. It's only once you've moused in and out that the overlay disappears (at leas, that's the case in Chrome).
While visually I really like the design, in terms of usability I'm not entirely sold on it. Book covers can be hard to read (for both the title and the author) and there can be many different cover designs which people may not recognise. I would strongly suggest adding adding the title and author as static text that you can see at all times.

One other point, I don't think the disparity between positive and negative cloud icons is big enough. On Rotten Tomatoes it's crystal clear.

Love the site concept. Have been looking for a site like this for ages. Looking forward to seeing it grow.