Inhibiting fuzzy search possible?

July 27, 2006 4:17 PM

How can I force many sites' search functions to not treat the entry in the Title: field as a keyword?

For example, on Amazon, Abebooks, and my local library, if I enter a title of a book that's a single word (like Snoopy) the results are any title containing that word (and sometimes, not even). But there IS a book with that one-word title, published in 1958 -- how to restrict the results returned to what I entered? Is there perhaps some magic control character one can use, to force an exact search?

Please note that I'm not looking for Snoopy, it's just an example that demonstrates this annoyance feature.

posted by Rash to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Not as far as I know. But if you can sort the results alphabetically, you can easily locate the exact match if there is one. You can do this at Abebooks, at Amazon when searching within a category, and at most library sites.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:27 PM on July 27, 2006

There's no magic control character that will work at two different websites. So if you want to find out how to search for an exact title at Amazon, that'll be different than how to search for an exact title at Abebooks, and so on. That's a lot of work when it could be a lot easier.

The way to make it a lot easier is to find any website that will let you look up a book by exact title and in its results provide an ISBN. Libraries sound like the best bet for that to me, because if you do a "title begins with" search on a typical library catalogue, you'll get "Snoopy" before you get "Snoopy comes of age", and you won't get "When Snoopy Was Put Down" at all.

Then you can use the ISBN to search for that exact book at individual book websites or at isbn.nu to search many at once.
posted by mendel at 6:36 AM on July 28, 2006