We’ve released further changes to the TitlePage search algorithm today, based on invaluable bookseller feedback. This will largely affect the Quick search and Keyword search, where – in a small percentage of cases – the balance between known-item searches for title and author, and broader exploratory results, was not performing as well as we wanted.

The changes released today should significantly improve results for the kind of searches where issues have been reported to us. Please keep sending through any examples or leaving feedback, where you still find that the results you would reasonably expect aren’t appearing near the top. Specific examples are particularly useful, as they allow us to understand how the search is behaving in real-world use, and continue tuning the search algorithm accordingly.

Best practice will still be to separate distinct terms or fields within the Keyword or Quick search using a comma. For example, if you know you’re searching for part of the author name and part of the title, the most direct Quick search would be “title, author”.

We know however that in the real world we can’t expect users to always know how to best format a search query. We’ve added visual cues in the search interface, and will continue to reinforce this approach in our training material, but we’re also aiming to optimise the search algorithm so that it handles these searches well regardless.