In the next few days we’re releasing an update to Talpa Search—a major jump in Talpa’s ability to find books and other media within library catalogs.

Today we’ve released a set of 200 “benchmark,” or test searches. Together with hundreds more, these are the searches we use to assess Talpa’s quality, test particular tweaks and features, and track Talpa’s improvement over time.

This set is named “What’s that book?” It consists of 200 searches, each of which has a single best answer. For example, the best answer to the search “prince harry memoir” is Spare. They were created by LibraryThing staff, generally about their own books, or books they know well.

By “best answer” we don’t mean the questions are all easy, or even clear. Some examples:

• “men coming out of the attic” (The Husbands by Holly Gramazio)
• “recent book by calvin and hobbes creator” (The Mysteries by Bill Watterson)
• “buckbeak” (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling)

The searches cover different types of searches:

• Award — “2024 national book award novel” (James by Percival Everett)
• Sequel — “murderbot book after network effect” (Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells)
• Series position — “The 22nd book in the Mitch Rapp series” (Code Red by Vince Flynn)
• Character — “romance with Derek Pender” (The Rule Book by Sarah Adams)
• Recency — “Newest Tana French novel” (The Hunter by Tana French)
• Plot — “book where all wheat and rice dies. it takes place in britain” (The Death of Grass by John Christopher)

Talpa handles some other broad types, such as date-restricted titles (“1980s teen films”), author searches (“Lisa Carey”) and subjects (“persian art”), but these don’t have a single best answer, so they’re not included in this set.

We’ve included typos and spelling mistakes, because a good system should be able to handle these:

• “writing advice from steven [sic] king” (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King)
• “taylor swift book be [sic] rolling stone reporter” (Heartbreak Is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield — 45 copies)

We’ve tried to include different ways a patron might word their search:

• Questions — “what is the third bond book?” (Moonraker by Ian Fleming)
• Plot description — “novel where four strangers trap two gay dads and their daughter in a summer cabin” (The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay)
• Bunch of stuff — “ya mystery, dark academia, black author, missing roommate” (Where Sleeping Girls Lie by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé)

Because patrons are often interested in newer books, half the set are to new books, published 2023–2024. The other half are published before 2023. Although Talpa Search can handle movies and music, only book searches are included in this set.

That’s it!

For fun, we’ve hidden the answers so you can test yourself. If you want all the answers unhidden, click show all answers. The searches are also available as a text file, here.

If you find any problems, let us know!

The Queries

Show all answers

Labels: Talpa Search