At Inkmesh we constantly ask ourselves how we can make ebook search better, and we’re always trying to improve by listening to our users and by studying how they interact with the site. Based on this feedback, we have made some changes over the last few days:

• Language Filters: A third of our visitors are from outside the United States, and the ability to filter results by language has been one of our most-requested features for a very long time. Not any more – you can now filter results by the most common languages in our index. English is still the predominant language, but we have thousands of ebooks in French, German, Spanish and Italian. We will introduce filtering on more languages as part of the planned advanced search feature.
• Improved Subject Browsing: We have completely overhauled the way we rank ebooks when you browse by subject. Subject searches are now even faster, and our new ranking algorithm gives much more importance to ebook popularity instead of focusing heavily on price as in the previous version. Users have already begun clicking through to many more ebooks as a result of this change, and we’re going to continue to improve it so you can find the right ebook even more quickly.
• UK Sites: We recently added UK ebook retailers Waterstone’s and WHSmith to our list – this should help our UK users with ebook price comparisons. Both these retailers display ebook prices in GBP on their sites, but to make comparisons easier we display their prices in USD using the latest exchange rate from Google. We plan to add more UK retailers and display book prices in other currencies soon.
• Where available, we now display the average rating and user review count for search results and on individual book pages. For most ebooks we have rating and review information from multiple sites; we select the site with the highest number of reviews for that book.

We hope you like these changes – feel free to leave feedback on our forum here, on Twitter, Facebook or over email. We look forward to hearing from you!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 2:25 pm and is filed under New Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.