Searching For Books?

Abebooks Search: NEW AND IMPROVED

April 2004: Abebooks is pleased to announce the launch of our new Search - it's faster, more accurate, and easier to use.

Major enhancements are detailed below - we've added Search Preferences and improved how Advanced Search and Search Results are displayed. We've also included some information regarding continuing improvements that we're planning for the next few months.


Search Preferences | Advanced Search | Search Results | Upcoming Changes



NEW: Search Preferences

  • Accessible from the Advanced Search, Search Results, and Ordering Information pages, this new feature gives you option to save your search preferences including
  • Boolean searching (on or off)
  • Bookseller Country
  • Sortby (newest, lowest price, highest price, etc.)
  • Results per page

Note: Cookies allow you to save separate search preferences for different Abebooks domains. Search preferences will be applied to your advanced search defaults whether you are signed on or off. However, they will not persist across different browsers or different computers.

[Search Preferences]



IMPROVED: Advanced Search

  • Adding the ability to search by Bookseller
  • The [Clear Fields] button will always clear all fields, even when accessed through "refine search".
  • Navigation has been added to the Advanced Search, Search Results, and Ordering Information pages with links to Advanced Search, Search Tips, Glossary, E-mail to a friend, Wants and Search Preferences
  • The Publisher/Date field is now two distinct fields - Publisher and Published Date (min/max). You can enter a date range, or fill the min field to receive a date range from that date to the present, e.g. from 1980 would return results from 1980 to present. If you fill in the max field to receive a date range up to that date, e.g. to 1925 returns results from 0 to 1925. Please note: Inputting a date into the publisher field will continue to yield results as existing.

[Advanced Search]



IMPROVED: Changes to the Search Results

  • Add "Shipping: [Rates and Speeds]" to each listing underneath price information so you can check the shipping rate for that item
  • Add [Browse this Seller's Books] under each listing so a user can browse the entire inventory of that bookseller
  • Move [Add to Basket] and [Ordering Information] to the right of the listing to make it more clear
  • Move the "Refine Search" and "Search within results" options to the right side of the page, and options below to "Narrow Your Results".
  • You will have the following options available to narrow your search:
    • Attributes: First Edition, Signed, Dustjacket, Soft Cover, Hard Cover, With Book Photo
    • Bookseller Location: bookseller countries

These options will appear when you can use them to narrow your search. Once clicked, the option will be added to your search and you will see refreshed search results. These options, and other search terms including title, author, keyword, publisher, etc., can be removed from your search by clicking the [x] beside that search term.

If you perform a search and get no results, you will see there is a new layout with more options:

  • Option to perform a new quick search from this page using title author and keyword.
  • Provide links to [Advanced Search] and [Search Tips]
  • Option to "Add to Wants (Leave a Want to be notified when this item is available)"
  • Option for "Having a trouble remembering the title or author? Maybe BookSleuth can help." This links the user to the BookSleuth forum.
  • Option to "Find it in a WorldCat library." This allows users to search the OCLC WorldCat database.

Coming Soon

The changes above are only the beginning of the exciting new features to come. Over the next few months, we will be gradually adding other new search features. Hand in hand with better search technology, we are working on changes to our data structure to continue improving the quality of the search function and the quality of the search results themselves. You will continue to see faster, better access to our inventory of over 50 million books.
A few of the features you can expect:

  • More search fields from the Advanced Search page (including editor and condition)
  • More options to narrow your searches and browse within your results including price, publish date, and category


Please check back to this page to see what recent changes have been implemented.

 

Archived News: January 2004

New Search Software

We have been working on implementing new search software on our site over the past year, and the first new functionality has now been added. We have implemented search software from Endeca because the continued success of Abebooks and its member booksellers depends on building the best online source of used, rare, and out-of-print books.

The immediate benefits of the new search software are:

  • "Keyword" search now searches title, author, publisher, keyword and description fields
  • Faster search results time
  • More accurate and precise searching
  • Optional enhanced Boolean searching*
  • Inventory updates from our booksellers every 15 minutes


* Boolean searches are searches using the words "AND", "OR", or "NOT". The tilde (~) can also be used to represent "NOT". Eg. Search for author: Tolkien, and title: Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. Boolean searching can provide more results when only a portion of information is known or to get more precise results, such as when searching for a book and ruling out all "ex-lib" or all "bce (book club edition)" results. This means that searches can be done for all books by an author, excluding books with ex-lib or bce or bc in the description (author: Tolkien, keyword: hobbit not (ex-lib or bce))

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