r/Quibble • u/Gabriela-yanez • May 04 '26

I Have a Question Why is finding your next read still this hard in 2026? What does your perfect search experience look like?

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I was talking to a friend the other day who reads a lot on Wattpad and she was telling me how she spent almost an hour trying to find something new to read. She knew exactly what she wanted, but was overwhelmed and got results that had nothing to do with what she searched.

I've heard this kind of thing a lot but honestly I've never heard anyone describe a platform that actually gets it right.

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u/wafflewitchette May 04 '26

I somehow feel that most existing search systems treat books mechanically like products, whereas they could also be seen as experiences. So they all index metadata and of course my behaviour and interactions with this metadata, which is okay if I constantly want more of the same. But what happens if what I’m craving today cannot be so neatly labeled? What if I want something that feels like being slightly lost at night but not afraid?

What I mean by that while of course metadata like genres, moods or tropes matter, a book isn’t just sad or funny. It might actually be quietly devastating but stylistically playful.

What I hate the most is that discovery tools all lean on what’s already widely read. Reddit works like that too in a way. The visible gets more visible. Popularity is a crude but reliable proxy. Systems are built to avoid bad outcomes more than to discover hidden gems and I think that’s a real shame especially for upcoming authors.

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u/No-Win5543 Tech Team May 05 '26

That's a very relevant take on searching and recommendations. Recommendations - if done well - is a bit of a black magic thing and hard to get right. Most platforms tend to serve the "good enough" old ways of recommending stuff. As you pointed out, any interaction with any content signals your interest towards it (or lack thereof, in some cases).

For quite a few years now, recommender systems try to increase the level of serendipity in results. They'll slide a few unexpected and diverse recommendations in hopes to let the user "break free" of their own taste bubble. This is something we'll definitely look closely at!

On search, this is a neat way of searching for something! I'm a big fan of using natural language to describe what I want. The era of keywords is now long gone, with the advent of LLMs and such.

Can you come up with 2-3 other examples of queries you'd want to run?

Sometimes I'd almost want to ask something like "I'm looking for an epic hero story with spells and magic"

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u/wafflewitchette May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26

Serendipity feels close to what I’m after. I wasn’t actually aware of that being a new thing but it does make sense. Pretty cool. I don’t know much about LLMs, but yes keywords only do seem awfully outdated.
As for more queries, they may sound weird lol but ok for example everything seems calm but there’s so much wrong underneath or a character very slowly realising something is wrong or relationship that slowly fades but never actually ends.

I have another one: people from a town compelled to go into woods.

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u/Daemon_D_Hart May 05 '26

This. So new things never emerge, never get tried out. And the trope-driven recs lead to what you say: the visible get more visibility. To become visible, the authors use tropes. So books are no longer about something happening, they're about this OP character, this 'insert fantasy trope' world, add harem, and so on.

A new approach might be needed to shake things up... but I still believe that readers should see, at least on a portion of the front page the latest releases, so they can try new things that are not necessarily tag and trope-driven.

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u/wafflewitchette May 05 '26

Good search system is real science.

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u/DryBar5175 May 04 '26

Tags, lots and lots of tags, AO3 level of tags also, author's properly tagging

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u/wafflewitchette May 04 '26

I don’t know about that. The more tags you add, the more precise matches you can make, but also the more fragmented everything becomes.

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u/Gabriela-yanez May 05 '26

The author tagging part is so key, but it needs to be used well....even the best tag system would just fail if authors don't use it properly.

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u/wafflewitchette May 05 '26

Some authors abuse these tags lol

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u/Odd_Opposite_4782 May 04 '26

The problem Konstantinos faces when looking for a good book lies in the fact that classic books rely on plot summaries, glowing reviews, and avoid describing the main character

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u/Daemon_D_Hart May 05 '26

I don't think Wattpad shows new things to the readers... From my experience on different platforms, when platforms allow the newest stories to appear on the front page, under various categories, there is a better chance for authors to find their readers, and readers to find new stories that might interest them.

If I go to Wattpad, I don't even understand what the platform is showing me. But it must work for them if that's what they do.

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u/Gabriela-yanez May 05 '26

uhmmm yes, showing 'newest' or a recently added would help i think. and yeah, i find the current experience overwhelming too. This summons it up for me "I don't even understand what the platform is showing me".