Bad alignments and AJAX errors

[tfmorris]

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.

[ryanfb]

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.