I was searching here in LingQ for some interesting books, but I can’t digit the name direct and see if there is the content there. I saw the book “The Linguist on the Language” and I would like to know if there was such content here, but I can’t search it direct. Other time I tried to search using control+f and I found what I wanted, but I had to roll pages and pages of content to get what I wanted. Maybe, there was a simple way to do search and I don’t know, if it’s the case let me know, please.
@Beatrizm - I’m not sure I quite understand what you mean. Are you trying to search in the Library, or are you trying to search within a specific course or lesson?
There isn’t a way to search for a specific word in a course, but you can search for a specific word in the Library or My Lessons section. Keep in mind, though, that when searching for a specific word in the Library you’ll likely find a lot of results of lessons that contain that single word 
Steve’s book “The way of the linguist” is here : Login - LingQ
Searching lingq is a bit tricky, I think. To find this I went to the English library, then clicked on courses, then searched on the book title.
Alex, the search is a strange mystery. If you search for a lesson title or a course title, it sometimes work. Othertimes not. Even if you know the exact title of the lesson.
What I especially find strange is that when I open the library and click on sorting by most recently added I would expect to see the newest lessons in this language slot. I do this to be up to date, which lessons are new. In older versions of LingQ (3 or 4 years ago) this was really simple. But now it doesn’t work at all. It looks like you don’t show the date (published, added) any longer in the library, so it is not obvious, but for English I see on the first page lessons from “Jill & Kate podcast” and “Steve and Jill’s podcasts” and I know that Jill has left LingQ 5 or 6 years ago.
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Agree with Veral - an easy way to find new content added, is a mystery for me, too.
I used to know how to do this. But now, I can never figure it out.
Like Veral says, if I search library, for recently added, the results are all old. If I then click courses, it seems a better result, but I am still not sure if this is all new content (or just new courses etc). Further it is just a limited selection of courses, so it never gives me any confidence.
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This is one of the worst and most annoying bugs in LingQ, and it exists for a long, long time. Sometimes I ask myself: The developers and the LingQ team - aren’t they really testing (and using) the features?? If the users come across these bugs, why aren’t they fixed after such a long time? Instead of adding new and often useless new features, why not first fix ALL the bugs?
@alex, I was trying to search for a specific course, but I didn’t find a easy way to do that
@ Beatrizm
@VeraI - Thanks for the heads up about the Recently Added sort. This was working properly not too long ago, though something seems to have changed here. I’ve reported this again to our development team and we’ll look at getting it fixed soon.
Would you be able to provide specific examples of lessons/courses that you are able to find and others that you are unable to find? These examples should help give us a better idea of what might be affecting this.
Search is something that is notoriously difficult, and we don’t claim to be search experts by any means Instead, we’ve focused our efforts on building the Learn page and defaulting to a sort by roses, as this helps suggest relevant lessons to the vast majority of our users. However, we are certainly open to improving the search so specific examples will go a long way in helping improve it!
@nd71 - To answer your question, we do use LingQ but everyone uses the site differently, and each of us individually do not use all the features that exist on the site. It’s always a delicate balance as well, as sometimes an issue will affect thousands of users, and other times it will only affect five or ten users. We then have to decide where to slot things in. In many ways, we rely on our users for feedback and bug reports, but I don’t think this makes us any different from other smaller software companies. We also have todo lists that are very long (and never seem to get shorter!), so we have to make the decision whether it makes sense, for example, spending a month fixing rare issues on the Lesson page, or spend that month improving improving our intro email campaigns, or spend that month improving our analytics tracking and A/B testing platform. It’s often an “or”, seldom an “and”.
In the end, if people see value in the site and the service we provide then they will pay for it, and based on the overall trend I would say we’re continuing to move in a positive direction.
@alex
This bug:
– was reported several times
– exists for years (since the new library was introduced)
Don’t tell me that it affects only a few people…
So why is it not fixed? Such bugs refrain me from paying for your service.
The problem with having the lessons sorted (primarily/only) by number of roses, include:
- Even here the results are random, with high rose lessons going missing from the search. Also, lessons with low roses appear over the top of lessons with high roses etc.
- Rose giving is highly random - some lessons within a course have high roses - other lessons, even within the same course (lessons which are arguably far more useful for language learning), have little or no roses.
- Roses don’t reflect how well a lesson actually helped someone along the language learning curve.
- The rose system favours historical - first in - lessons. For example, if all you get when you sort are the high rose lessons - then you will naturally start with those lessons - give some of them a rose - and by default they become even higher rose lessons. It doesn’t mean they are the best lessons, it just means that they historically (and through a random contest) have pushed to the top, and by default of the system, will stay at the top, regardless of better new lessons.
- Still no way to search for new content. Really frustrating if you have gone through all the content and just want to know what is new.
- No way to search for “vetted” content. This is content recommended by people that have used lingq for many years, know the library content very well, have used the content to reach a good level in a language, and can vouch for which content is highly worthwhile. It doesn’t mean that any one person’s recommendation (by itself) will be worthwhile, but if you collect enough of these users feedback - you will come up with a good amount of curated / premium-type lingq content feedback - which is better than the rose system (as it appears at present).
Some examples:
- The best course in the lingq Mandarin library is the Wolf and Huahua series here: Login - LingQ
The majority of the lessons in this series have no roses, at all.
A lesson, on tea, is the highest ranked lesson within this series, with 9 roses. It isn’t a particularly good lesson (compared to others in this series) - but is on a topic that is often shared in common with people studying Chinese, so I guess it gets a number of hits and roses.
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The best lessons in the lingq English library, imo, are the natural conversations/dialogues - these are often buried within the English Linq course with little to no roses. Yet some monologues, on language learning, in English, have 90 or more roses. These monolgues may be of fleeting interesting to a language learner - but they aren’t going to get you terribly fluent, and shouldn’t appear at the top of every sort.
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Still no easy way to search for new content.
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@iaing - I hear you on these different points. For sure we can make changes to the logic of how things are displayed, etc.
For now what we’d be most interested in is fixing issues where the search, sorting and filtering isn’t working properly. Even if we change the logic, these are still issues that will likely exist, so before changing how things are sorted it’d be best to clean up any existing issues in the Library.
Would you be able to give me an example of point 1 above, where certain results are missing from the search?
@nd71 - My apologies, my response above was a bit more general, but as I look again I’m not sure exactly which issue you’re referring to. Just to make sure we’re on the same page here would you confirm which issue your posts are directed towards?