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Good news about the book search bug

November 14, 2019
You may or may not have spotted Ardik's update about the problems with the book search function that's used during registering books, which he posted here. We think you'll not want to miss it, so here it is. Ardik, you have the floor!

Well, I think this is solved now ...

I did some research during the last days.
And I believe I fixed it.

It's slightly more complicated than what I'm going to outline below. But this description gives a reasonable overview, anyway:

- Google Books has a daily(?) quota for lookup request from a single IP (like from bookcrossing.com). - I haven't found out how much is allowed, but it must be many thousands (see below).
- Every day we did hit that quota sooner or later. That's when lookup started to fail, day by day.
- [skipping some tech stuff ... ;-> ]
- Every registered book has this "Global Overview" link. When you click that link you get sort of a - yeah - global overview. That page automatically calls a Google Books lookup.

-> "Spiders", those crawlers of search engines, follow rather any link they find. So these crawlers found these "Global Overview" pages.
They accounted for some two thousand Google Books lookups - per hour!

--> For the time being I've closed that "Global Overview" for anyone who's not logged in.
In the long run this probably doesn't make sense, I think this page should be avl for the public (what do you think?).
But as a short term solution this reliably locks out those overactive spiders. And in the background I've made a few more modifications to further leverage this issue.
(Yes, there are more regular ways to achieve this, but this is a quick, short term solution.)

---> As a result I expect Google Books Lookups to - more or less permanently - start working properly again within the next 24 hours.

On a side note this seems to indicate, well, I think I'm mostly back again.
But that's a different story to be told another time.

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