@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”?
Why can’t I find this show without inputting the comma. Like it shouldn’t care so much about punctuation. At least don’t give me terminator when all I’m missing is the comma hahaha.
I feel like the issues with search go beyond fuzzy search and are even a problem when titles are entered exactly. In addition, some sort of results caching seems to play into it, as well.
I just finished watching the 1941 short “The March of Time: G-Men Combat Saboteurs”. I looked for it with exactly this string, as it is on TMDB. Trakt returned close to a million results, but the movie wasn’t on the first page, so I started filtering. I filtered specifically for 1941, which still gave me thousands of results, but I couldn’t find the one I was looking for. I added a filter for runtime <25 min. Still hundreds of results, the one I’m looking for not on the first page. When I also added filters for “Documentary” genre and “English” language, the results were reduced to 97. But still, I had to browse to results page 2 of 3 to find the movie with the 1:1 exact title I had entered into the search box.
I have now marked this movie as watched, and since then, it’s always returned as the first result, by exact title or even if just looking for the part after the colon. So my interacting with the movie seems to have somehow pushed it to the front. It also works in a private window, so it’s not tied to my account or preferences.
Sure enough, if I now start looking for another March of Time short by exact TMDB title – I tried “The March of Time: Policeman’s Holiday” – I once more get pages and pages of all sorts of result not even close to that title.
I made a change last week to ignore some punctuation so by you marking it watched that caused the movie to reindex. Movies and shows will naturally reindex over the next week and show improvements in the same way.
Yes, there is no difference in our search steps: as I mentioned in my post I also get it as a first result now, after I had found and tracked/rated/commented on it (to clarify, this didn’t just push the result up for me, but for everyone, which I verified by using a private browser window).
If you want to see the problem in action, try looking for the other example I mentioned, “The March of Time: Policeman’s Holiday”. So far, this hasn’t been rated or re-indexed, and is practically impossible to find on Trakt without setting very exact additional filters.
I repeated the steps now with a second short of the series, “The March of Time: G-Men at War”. Once again, I was only able to find it by exact title search after adding the additional filters “English”, “Documentary”, “United States”, and “1942”, which reduced the results from over a million to 60, among which the exact title match was still only one of the last ones.
I kept repeating the search in a private window to see when it would be pushed up in the results. Marking it as watched didn’t change anything, but once I set a rating, it moved to the top, and now I can also get it always as result 1 even with partial title search, just like for the first short.
I’ll be trying to find some other March of Time shorts a week from now to see if the reindexing you mentioned has made a difference!
