Improve Search Results Experience when 0 results

[mekarpeles]

If the user is in mode=ebooks mode for search, but there are no results, we should fall back to search mode=everything and/or at least show the user some other options + a useful message which doesn't feel like a dead-end

[mekarpeles]

We're going to fall back to the next /search/inside full-text search! cc: @brewsterkahle

[mekarpeles]

History

1. Some searches return non results -- this is not a great experience
2. We had implemented a fallback to full text search in 1001/feature/fts fallback when 0 search results #1025
   this was expensive and could be confusing so we rolled back the change in Disable auto full text search fallback #3288

We still don't want dead ends. The revised proposal is to:

• show no results w/ warning message
• Instead of showing the text, "Search for books containing the phrase [...]" as a link, change it to the text, "Showing books containing the phrase [...]" and asynchronously load up to 5 fulltext search results w/ a link to switch to "see more" which goes to the /search/inside tab

[tfmorris]

I recommend looking at this through a different lens. Dead ends are unsatisfying, but the best solution is to avoid them in the first place, not to send the user on a detour down a different dead end.

I recently copied the book title, "Cornell ’77: The Music, the Myth and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead Show at Barton Hall," from an article and pasted it into the OpenLibrary search box resulting in exactly zero matches. Searching "All" instead of "Title" also returned zero matches. Switching to full-text search resulted in ... zero matches. Can you spot the one word (out of sixteen) that the article author transcribe wrong for Cornell '77: the music, the myth, and the magnificence of the Grateful Dead's concert at Barton Hall?

If search returned results which were close (I consider 15 of 16 words close), there would be many fewer dead ends to worry about. This applies to single letter transpositions, small typos, and all the other things the Google & Duck Duck Go handle effortlessly, but completely stump OL Search.