Typesense Books Search
Data
book search
SHOW HN2020
424points
80comments
#76of 3,028 in 2020
Top 3%of 2020 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
9 positive, 15 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 16 critical, out of 42 comments about the project. Thread score -0.26.
Execution: 1 for, 10 againstPerformance: 1 for, 2 againstDocs: 2 for, 1 againstDesign: 1 for, 1 againstIdea: 0 for, 2 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Fast search performance
From 2 comments
The typesense performance is really impressive, seems at par with the (also) impressive meilisearch. I'm going to try the free tier of typesense right now, perfect for my current…
tmikaeld on HNCan't fault the performance! Nice work. My one UX suggestion would be to present search results in a more table-like layout, as reading both across and down to see every result…
mpalmer on HN
Impressive build time for the scope
From 2 comments
Pretty good for a 12 hours hacking!
allenleein on HNYou might want to clarify that this does not search 28M books, it searches metadata for 28M books. Very different. I notice many titles did not have authors. I spot checked this…
_tom_ on HN
Objections
Duplicate editions appear in results
From 2 comments
Seems like this exposes the flaw in the dataset. Eg, searching for "cixin liu" there are many different variations of the same book that show up, lots and lots of duplication.
tommoor on HNI did a few quick tests. There are some issues with ranking and duplicates that I see. I typed "Neal Stephenson" and got lots of duplicates for his latest novels. Cleaning up the…
jillesvangurp on HN
Stop-word filtering breaks titles and phrases
From 3 comments
Straight up impossible for me to search for Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot". Some kinda of input cleaning strips out the I from "I robot", and just searches "Robot". "iRobot" does not…
impalallama on HNGreat project. It seems though, that Books search does not support phrase search and stop words are ignored: "king of england" becomes king england. Is this by design? Does this…
wolfgarbe on HNSadly it isn’t finding the first two books I looked for that are in the dataset. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7116092W/The_church_of_Christ And…
jtbayly on HN
Ranking favours subject books over the works themselves
From 1 comment
I did a few quick tests. There are some issues with ranking and duplicates that I see. I typed "Neal Stephenson" and got lots of duplicates for his latest novels. Cleaning up the…
jillesvangurp on HN
Results include books not available to borrow
From 1 comment
I've searched for 'Lovecraft' and then opened first 15 results - no book was in library. Then I went to the openlibrary.org and again searched for 'Lovecraft' and among first 20…
rayrag on HN
Slow search while typing before debounce was added
From 2 comments
There needs to be debounce. Currently seeing 2-10s+ for simple typing, and it jitters around from what I typed. Searching from Perth, Australia.
thejosh on HNSame here (EU, The Netherlands). I thought it was broken at first. Took longer than 10 seconds (I think about 20/30s) before I started seeing results. Unusable.
dutchbrit on HN
Requests
Exact phrase search with quotes
From 2 comments
I would love, if possible, to do an exact multi-word search, e.g. "Bill Gates". Currently if the phrase is not found, you get results for one of the words. Putting the search in…
yboris on HNOP: > I built this in about 12 hours as a weekend project, so there might be some lurking issues. > Yup, exact matching using quotes is on the horizon. Should be available in a…
ibraheemdev on HN
AND-based multi-word search
From 1 comment
It's super uncomfortable when any site uses OR based search. Is there a way to perform AND based search so that when I write more words, the results reduce instead of increasing…
smusamashah on HN
Table-style result layout
From 1 comment
Can't fault the performance! Nice work. My one UX suggestion would be to present search results in a more table-like layout, as reading both across and down to see every result…
mpalmer on HN
Filter for books available in the library
From 1 comment
A big problem with the OpenLibrary website is that there is no way to filter search results for books that are actually in the library, which I find quite odd TBH. This "Instant…
markdown on HN
Fix browser history on each keystroke
From 1 comment
Cool! Small bit of feedback: typing each character adds an entry to the browser's history which seems a bit excessive. Might consider using replaceState over pushState.
BenElgar on HN
Questions
How large is the dataset and what nodes are needed
From 1 comment
The typesense performance is really impressive, seems at par with the (also) impressive meilisearch. I'm going to try the free tier of typesense right now, perfect for my current…
tmikaeld on HN
Can Typesense sync with PostgreSQL automatically
From 1 comment
@jabo is it possible to connect typesense (or any other instance search provider) to a postgresql instance and have it “just work”?
interactivecode on HN
Why use a custom search instead of an off-the-shelf query syntax
From 1 comment
It also strips quotation marks, so can't search phrases at all. I'm always sort of surprised by this stuff. Like, isn't 99% of the effort to get access to the database, how to…
jessriedel on HN
Alternatives named
Meilisearch
From 1 comment
The typesense performance is really impressive, seems at par with the (also) impressive meilisearch. I'm going to try the free tier of typesense right now, perfect for my current…
tmikaeld on HN
Elasticsearch and Solr
From 1 comment
I'm curious, what do you feel meilisearch offers that is better than elasticsearch or solr?
binarymax on HN
Open Library's own search
From 1 comment
Jabo, I love to see this, more access for the book community -- especially how quickly it came together. Nice work Jabo and excited to see Typesense in action. Open Library…
mekarpeles on HN
Google Books
From 1 comment
> I thought it was going to search inside the 28M books Google Books does this, not sure how many books though.
bergstromm466 on HN
pg_search and ZomboDB for Postgres
From 2 comments
Is such a thing possible? Yes. Has anybody built it? No :(. That would totally be the dream though. No reindexing. Pg_search is def fast enough for a large swath of use cases.…
adenta on HNNever tried it out (it's on my never-getting-done list), but someone has built it: https://github.com/zombodb/zombodb
necovek on HN