Feature:90163

Don't return coverart records in basic searches.

In many cases, particularly when a title has many publications with different cover artists, the number of coverart results retuened by a basic title search overwhelmes the actual title records, and confuses or frustrates the average user or newcommer, Particularly when a title search returns multiple titles, some of them may well be squeezed out of the 100 result limit on a basic search. Basic title searches should return only titles of types that have actual publications, such as novels, shortfiction, anthologies, collections, and chap(ter)books. art records should not be returned, and neither should reviews, Leave those to advanced searches. -DES ^Talk 19:23, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Reviews are a pain too, although often smaller in number. The unwillingness to merge COVERART records (presumably as we have no agreement on what the "art" actually means) compounds the problem - we upload exact covers showing title or price differences but with the same coverart. But we rarely have more reviews for a title than we have fingers. Is a separate feature request required for reviews? COVERART is multiplying via cloning, REVIEWS aren't.BLongley 19:51, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree that coverart records are a much bigger problem than reviews. Even if we merged all coverart records for the same title and artist (which i am inclined to thing we ought to do more often, but that is another discussion) cover art records would still overwhelm searches in many cases, particularly when a title has many publications with truly different art (and different artists). Do a search on "Fahrenheit 451" and you will find 14 coverart records and one interior art record, "Beyond This Horizon" has a similar number. Vaguer searches are worse: a title search on "Doomsday" finds 37 coverart records, 17 interior art records, and 27 review records, for a total of 81 probably unwanted records out of 163 total results, or roughly half. Note that without art and review record the results fit in a single page, with them a user must use advanced search to see the full results. If we had to exclude only one type coverart is the type to exclude, but once the code is being changed to exclude by type it ought to be trivial to include all the unwanted types. What might be harder but still a good idea: exclude serials from basic search results if there are any non-serials with the same title & author. The multiple part records of serials can also clutter the results, and are not what is usually wanted from a basic title search. -DES ^Talk 20:19, 30 September 2008 (UTC)