At the moment we can’t find authors by searching for the alias. That’s extremely annoying for authors with a non latin main entry.
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Hi!
I’ll need to investigate but a quick search for “lemony” returns Daniel Handler (alias Lemony Snicket).
https://bookbrainz.org/search?q=lemony&size=20&from=0
Same thing for 刘慈欣 (Cixin Liu) Search Results – BookBrainz
Searching by alias appears to be working partially, at least.
I’ll need to investigate why it doesn’t work for “Alexander Grin”, because somehow some of the other aliases do work! I’m confused 
https://bookbrainz.org/search?q=Aleksandr+Stepanovich+Grinevsky&size=20&from=0
https://bookbrainz.org/search?q=Aleksandr+Green&size=20&from=0
Thanks for reporting the issue, and stay tuned !
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Actually it appears but on 2nd page. Looking a bit more, this alias is set as Multilanguage compared to the 2 others.
Tested by adding Grin as english alias and now the search return it on first page.
Seems it could be related to some priorities in search result, no?
edit:
tested a bit more and searching for Aleksander Grin or Grin only is more efficient than Alexander Grin.
Looks like search do not try to look for a full match.
Hope it can help.
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Thanks @ulugabi I missed that! The author does appear in the first page of results for me, just further down.
The search server considers it has some good results available for “Alexander” that match some entities’ name, so it returns that first.
Indeed the issue here is that “Alexander” is a common search result, whereas some other aliases —or even parts of aliases— have no other match such as “Stepanovich”
As far as I know all ‘aliases’ (which in the code includes the main name) are matched equally with no weight specifically added to the main name. That is what the search indexing code looks like at least.
However, we do have a system in place to subdivide the search query, which makes the search somewhat typo resilient. (For example “Stepvich” will also match the “Stepanovich” part of the alias)
To me this means we should have some priority given to a full match of the search query, meaning instead of matching groups of three letters “Ale”-“lex”-“exa”-“xan”-“and”-“nde”-“der” etc., we should also match “Alexander Grin” as a whole and give priority to a perfect match.
I think the knobs and buttons fo the search indexer can definitely be tweaked to achieve better results. I’ll look into it and see if I can improve the results.
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