book-aligner
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Bad alignments and AJAX errors
This is a cool service! (although not as cool as when I giddily thought it might be aligning texts across services :) )
Having said that, there seem to be some issues when searching for one of the books in another of your issues "Women's letters from Egypt". There are a number of non-matches included in the list from things which are plausible, like "Letters from ancient Egypt" with a similar title, but different authors, page counts, etc to "Angelina ice skates" which seems very far off the mark. I didn't look at the code to see how it's searching, but something definitely needs a little tweaking.
The bottom of the display also has a long list of errors of the form:
Error in HathiTrust AJAX call.
Error in Google Books AJAX call for identifier 185512691
Error in Google Books AJAX call for identifier 9780517596197
... with another ~20 lines like the last, but with different identifiers.
The AJAX errors should now be hopefully mostly resolved. Sometimes we may still run into service request limits.
The searching is based off a few different things, sometimes bad results get in because an identifier (OCLC, ISBN, etc.) has been erroneously assigned to a work in one of the data sources. My preference is for more permissive results - I'd rather have false positives (which I can filter out myself) than miss a potential copy. #36 and some controls around how the searching gets done may help this.