BookFinder.com, same great search, now 60% faster!

It may not always be obvious from the outside but we are constantly improving BookFinder.com to make it a better service for students, bibliophiles, collectors, and booksellers.  Over the past several weeks one of our programmers, Bryan, has been working on a project trying to see if he could improve the speed of our book search.

If you know a little about databases, and little is a word I would use to describe my knowledge of database searching, one of the more classic search problems is that as the amount of data you are looking at gets larger it takes proportionately longer to search though all the information.  So as you can guess this makes a quick search of millions upon millions of books from dozens of different websites all over the world a bit of a problem.

The fast solution would be to just limit our search time but we also know that you, our loyal users, come to BookFinder.com for our price comparisons of new and used books as well as for searching far and wide looking for rare, out-of-print, and downright hard to find books.  So we obviously we could never sacrifice breadth of search for speed or you might not find that 18th century periodical on gardening practices in West Suffolk which you were looking for.

So when Bryan announced at our weekly meeting that, after some intensive investigation followed by a couple weeks of hacking away at our search algorithms, he had managed to shave several seconds off our average search time I felt it was worth a bit of a brag. 

So enjoy our latest BookFinder.com improvement.  Same great BookFinder.com search, now 60% faster.

Comments

[Robert]

Thanks! Please don't ever limit the search time...

[James Van Eaton]

I can tell the difference. Good job.

[Gayle L.Hacker]

Looking for childrens book about 2 oriental brothers, one who had a very long name ( cheri-beri-rusi-no-sar-endo+++++++). Part of the story I remember is that the little brother fell in the well and by the time his mother says his name and for him to fetch a ladder it's almost too late.

[Scott Laming]

Gayle,
It doesn’t ring a bell with me, we can see if no one else comes up with a guess for you give the BookSluth over at AbeBooks a try.

http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Community/BookSleuth/

It's a forum where people discuss books that they cannot remember the title of but only have a description. Perhaps this will help you in your quest.

[Ian Moore]

Hi I am trying to find a book from my childhood. I remember it was about a family who got a new puppy, which couldnt sleep. In the end the father got a hot water bottle and a clock, put them in in a blanket which the puppy thought was its mother and then slept OK. Love to get it for my kids.

[Scott Laming]

Ian,
I would suggest the same as I just did for Gayle. Try AbeBooks Book Sleuth, or contact a Children's book specialist. You could search for one in Google or check on ILAB.org where you can search for booksellers by speciality.

Good Luck.