eleybourn/Book-Catalogue — Issue #294: Handling multiple search providers
Author: Grunthos
Created: 2012-02-15 22:11:37+00:00
State: open

We currently have:

- google
- amazon
- library thing

and I am adding goodreads.

Searching all 4 concurrently is technically fine, but probably overkill. I am also conscious of the possibility of one or more services disappearing, as well as a user possibly preferrring one site.

As a result, I am considering adding a new 'search provider preferences' activity in which the user can disable some providers and (maybe) choose the preferred order of precedence. Currently we use the precedence: google, amazon, LT....which means we use google data by preference then fill in the blanks from Amazon, and any remaining blanks from LT.

Goodreads will be added before LT because it can search without an ISBN; it also does not seem to unreasonable to me for a user to want goodreads to be the primary source etc.

Which then leads to sources for fields...we currently extract series names from titles at google and amazon, and get series names directly from LT and goodreads.

It *might* be desirable to say "I only want series from LT" or "I only want series from goodreads".

Aby thoughts?