@justin , can you give us some details about how search works in Trakt? I ask because search may be the only component of Trakt that I am dissatisfied with, especially as a subscriber, but I’m not sure if there are technical reasons why it works the way it does. Are you reliant on the search from the back-end API’s like TVDB, or is search running on the Trakt server/database?
There’s no fuzzy search so spelling has to be identical to the title, sometimes including punctuation, or you don’t find what you are looking for. This isn’t the best example, but searching for “Gray’s Anatomy” doesn’t find “Grey’s Anatomy”. And “Grey’s Anatomy” finds different results than “Greys Anatomy”. It’s really puzzling how it will sometimes find titles that aren’t even similar to my search term, and not find something that only differs by 1 character.
I understand if running a better search algorithm might take more server resources. Maybe make improved search a VIP feature?
The search feature on the Android app is so much better than the web and doesn’t require me to put exact titles. I used the Android app whenever I need to search for something.
We just released a major update to Trakt search that can handle typos and get much more accurate search results. The Trakt website, official apps, and all 3rd party apps that use the Trakt search API will have way better results now. Let us know if it works better for you!
This is pertaining to the website. I don’t want to risk the chance of losing my data in a Beta.
While I no longer get the “No Results Found” message, it’s sometimes extremely difficult to find what I’m looking for with search. I may get tens of thousands of results but what I want is nowhere on the first several pages of results. For example if I search for “ Nikki Glaser: good clean filth “ I must still type it exactly as that including the colon. Good Clean Filth yields nothing. Nikki Glaser Good Clean Filth yields nothing. Nikki Glaser yields nothing unless I tap on “People” and then I still need to scroll through all the results to finally find it.
As such an often used feature (for me), Search should be much more user friendly.
Justin, Thanx for all the awesome work you put into this. I still agree with LizardSpock that the search needs to be fuzzy. Still using the same example, if someone were to verbally recommend this to you, they would not say the word “colon” So you would have no idea that you actually have to type that punctuation into the search box. You would get no result. Neither would you get one if you spelled “Glaser” with a Z instead of an S.
Please keep up the great work!
I’m pretty sure when I searched for Dutch movies before, they’d show up, now I tried to look up a Dutch movie, and I got nothing.
I thought it wasn’t added to TMDb yet, but apparently there’s a whole lot of entries more important than the one I was looking for hahaha. 'cause last refresh was april 12th.
Agreed… I just searched for “Wicked Little Letters” and nothing came up. Tried “Little Letters” still nothing, then “Letters” - boom… it was the one second on the listing. Another one, same day… “LaRoy Texas” nope, “LaRoy” nope - “LaRoy, Texas” - bingo! Needed to have the comma.
This isn’t rocket science… this is basic searching and surely Trakt should be able to handle this.
Searching for “Wicked Little Letters” or “Laroy Texas” are both returned as the first result. Perhaps you have filters on or have your search results sorted by something other then “score”?
