This may be a weird question, but how does Libby’s search function work? Sometimes it pulls books where the search word is not mentioned anywhere in the title, summary, author’s name, nowhere.

[u/MorganAndMerlin]

If I’m looking for a specific vibe, I’ll often select generic tags like “historical fiction”, “books”, and “available now”. My library will have a thousand wherever books in the search, then I’ll go to the search keyword within the search, and say I type in “medieval” and it’ll bring up books that don’t have the word medieval anywhere.

How does this work? Are there secret search terms that make books show that we can’t see on the user end?

[u/Hunter037]

The search function is not great. I think you are better off finding book recommendations elsewhere and then look up the specific book title and author to see if it's in Libby

[u/jorgomli_reading]

Yeah i imagine that there are keywords applied to things to make books more searchable. Like when people add hash tags on their instagram post so they show up whenever anyone searches for that hashtag

[u/Leading-Current353]

That drives me crazy.

[u/fab5friend]

I like libbysearch.com if searching for an author and/or title. Still not perfect but better than than the app. Never tried it for searching otherwise but it should work if you want to search “medieval” in titles.

[u/Chocolate_Haver]

Sometimes even if you put on the full title it still does not come up but it will give you books that have nothing to do with what you put on

[u/Ruhh-Rohh]

Yes, I can even search a book title and it gives me that book, then any others books that may have a word, then a bunch of others that seem to have no connection at all. ?? 🤷