Like JordanL did some years ago (here) I tried my hand at coding a fanfiction.net search engine that ranks stories based on how often they appear in user-favorites and communities. Not just in any favorites and communities, but specifically in those favs and communites that are most similar to your own profile.

The basic idea actually isn't that new and Lord Ravenclaw did something similar for the DLP-library.

Sadly that can't be done by just accessing the ff.net database. One has to manually copypaste every user profile into a spreadsheet and... well... yeah... you get the picture. So for the last three weeks I was kind of busy and couldn't care for the library...


The engine can be found here.

Two examples:
Some Random Story Search
Some Random Small Fandom Search


It starts with you submitting either your fanfiction.net user-id or a story-id (or several) of stories you like. The engine will then look up which users and communities list the same stories and return the rest of their list - ranked by how many of these communites / users list it.

Right now the result is based on 16,000 communities and 50,000 users. With about 100 stories per user-favorites the database has to search through about 5 million user-story relations and might be a bit slow.

There still is some work to be done. I have to tweak the indices, especially concerning the text search options and I mangled the utf8 enconded text when moving the database - so don't bother to filter for some weird weeaboo characters.

Nevertheless I proved for myself that the entire problem is solveable. For me as mathematician that means from now on the problem is boring and not worth further time. Thus I might never update nor enhance it.

For now I'll sticky this thread. Perhaps it actually is of use for some people here.

 

I put in the story id for one of my favorite Worm fics.

The results tell me that peoples' tastes are really, really varied

Thanks for making the effort to do this.

 

A suggestion, maybe something a little closer to this if possible.

Code:

<ol>
<li> Users: 7, StoryId: <a href="ffsearch.php?storyid=4451412">4451412</a>, Category: Naruto<br>
<br>
<a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4451412/1/" target="_blank">Houses of the Holy</a> by HowdyU<span class="hidden" style="display: inline; margin-left: 1em;"><br>
<br>
	Spirited away from Konoha at an early age, Naruto finds a new family amid the strife of a battlefield as old as the shinobi nations. But what will he do when his new allies’ ambition is to change the world through a baptism by fire? An Akatsuki!Naruto fic<br><br>Naruto - Rated: M - English - Adventure - Chapters: 12 - Words: 127,994 - Reviews: 1045 - Favs: 2,054 - Follows: 1,849 - Updated: 1/15/2009 - Published: 8/5/2008 - Naruto U., Yugito N.</span></li><br>

<li> Users: 7, StoryId: <a href="ffsearch.php?storyid=4532323">4532323</a>, Category: Naruto<br>
<br>
<a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4532323/1/" target="_blank">Failing Twilight</a> by Shadow Rebirth<span class="hidden" style="display: inline; margin-left: 1em;"><br>
<br>
	ABANDONED. Naruto had learnt from a young age that life could get hectic, but all this chaos with Biju, daimyos, and psychotic missing-nin was going a bit too far. Now just throw in a fourth Great Shinobi War and you've got one pissed off seal master. [AU, no pairings.]<br><br>Naruto - Rated: T - English - Adventure - Chapters: 14 - Words: 75,508 - Reviews: 1121 - Favs: 2,625 - Follows: 2,742 - Updated: 6/3/2010 - Published: 9/11/2008 - Naruto U.</span></li><br>
</ol>

Edit: Also, when did you become Dark Friend ?

 

Jonicon violated my profile.

About the formatting of the summary and stats - the way I grab them I can't format them differently. It's one huge block beginning with the title and ending with the 'complete'

I never bothered (read: actually forgot) to finetune the grabber. For now I would need to pass it through some regular expressions first to clean that mess up. I might take a look into it next weekend.