the ask@AAR: Have you seen our new Power Search?
We have a new Power Search. Have you tried it? It’s–in my opinion–amazing. You can find it under the Reviews tab.
For starters, you can now search by tags. Caroline Russomanno has spent the past few years improving the tag system on our reviews and now, you can search by them. You can search by all kinds of things now, including words in the actual reviews themselves. The combinations are endless.
Want to read a book by an author of color (that tag is AoC), that’s a DIK, featuring royalty, and has the word Duke in it? Type in Duke in the top search bar, select DIK, and type in royalty and AoC in tags and select them. Viola! The book that meets your criteria is How to Catch a Queen by Alyssa Cole! If that’s too limiting–and given that not every review is perfectly tagged, it probably is–uncheck royalty. Now there are 16 books for you to choose from although one features a dog named Duke.
Want to see your answers sorted by newest review date? Well, that’s the default. But you can also choose to sort by grade, sensuality, or pub date.
We are calling this the beta edition because we are still working to make it perfect. You can help. Play around with it and let us know what you think about it, what you love, and what you don’t. You can either post in the comments or send me your feedback via a Google form. Thanks!
It’s super fast!
I’m glad that this makes it much easier to search for authors and get search results that include anthologies they’ve contributed to. And it all just looks great, design-wise.
It would be nice if it was either default or possible to check a box to only get results that feature all search terms. I tried searching for linda howard (and “linda howard” in case it made a difference – it didn’t) and also got results where only linda was in the text, no howard to be found.
Might be good to have a little help button with tips on how to search. Such as that you need to add a – in front of a word to filter out.
Yes–I’m going to write up a guide after we’ve tweaked it!
The new Power Search looks like a great feature to explore. I filled in a google form with some observations. Thanks AAR!
Wow! This is a very cool new feature for the site. I need more time to play with it – because, you know, I always have opinions – but boy is it FAST. Congratulations, to all involved!
Question/suggestion: will this search feature include blog posts at some point? Would adding “best of” tags to “tags” filtering include results from blog posts today?
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken the time to manually look for “best of” posts to thank someone/add comment about a book they’ve recommended. (Literally last night wanted to find the person(s) who recently recommended titles for which there is no review at AAR (yet): Cate Well’s Hitting the Wall and the Saints of Steel series (Paladin’s Grace, etc.)
I quite like the new way to search for books, the only thing I would add is that in the “Inspirational romance” category you can’t choose “Young adult” and “Inspirational romance” together in the same filter when there are books that fit both categories.
But I really like it overall a great way to quickly locate books and visually it’s better than the previous version.
That’s because we don’t have any books typed for both of those book types. Usually we just assign one type to a book. But there are cases, usually in historical romance, where we’ve assigned two types. If a book has two types–this is info we put in for every review–you could pick two.