What’s going on with the SEARCH feature for the last 24 hours? I enter an exact episode name and instead of getting 5-10 results I’m getting over 16k results.
Here’s an example of an Episode Search:
We found 2,389,995 results for S5 E14 · Air America: The CIA’s Secret Airline. You’re viewing page 1 of 66,389.
They tweaked the search functionality to allow for typos
See their Twitter Post
Getting 2,389,995 results isn’t an improvement.
Just relaying the message since you asked what was up.
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As a sort of workaround(?), I find it necessary to add quotes to search terms.
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Please provide some specific search examples so I can take a look. The number of results is because it’s matching on all the words individually. We should hopefully be able to improve the initial results with some specific examples.
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Here’s an EPISODE Search example.
We found 2,391,095 results for S5 E14 · Air America: The CIA’s Secret Airline. You’re viewing page 1 of 66,420.
As suggested by Duff_Daily (thanks) putting quote (") marks around the search terms resulted in only the one desired result.
Another EPISODE Search example:
We found 2,354,720 results for building the eiffel tower. You’re viewing page 1 of 65,409.
Again, quote marks around the search terms narrowed it down to the one correct result.
I agree! All of a sudden search has become an ungainly mess (for me). I use the search episode feature, particularly for shows that have a long history but poor data capture, such as Dateline (original). For a long time I’ve used, “Dateline: Show Title.” Not perfect, but serviceable. Now I’m getting hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages of hits. I’ve tried different combination of quotes, using “Show Title” filter, and other attributes to get a useable list—but it’s just a horrible mess that makes me sad.
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I wouldn’t focus on the number of search results. That’s gonna be a lot higher with partial and typo tolerance searching. We should focus on getting the relevant results on that first page. That’s what I’ll be looking at for episodes specifically, when I’m back in the office next week.
Movie and show searching is a lot more relevant with this update. Episodes will be tweaked to either boost the title field, or potentially a more standard way of including the show title.
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Still not working very well. Example of episode search with this show not on the 1st page of search results:
We found 1,076 results for “mushroom mains”. You’re viewing page 1 of 30.
Why mess with something that worked extremely well and is now chaotic?
I pushed an update so episode searches will match on the exact title first. This should boost the more relevant results. It will take a few days for the data to re-index.
There are also a few built in things you can already do. Using your “mushroom mains” example, if you limit the search to only title then it returns it first. By default it does a fuzzy search across multiple fields like the title, show title, and translations.
Already mentioned, but adding quotes around your term will also tell it to do a more exact search for items with those words.
The movie and show search (which are the primary searches people run) was not working extremely well. The new search with typo and partial matches is a lot more user friendly and returning much better results in our testing.
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There is no question “if” or “why” the update was needed. The search feature is now better than ever - for the most use-cases, like Justin mentioned. It needs a bit of fine-tuning maybe, but overall it’s much, much better!
It is not better for TV show episode searches. It is worse.
+ would usually give < 10 results versus the thousands to millions I get now.
As I mentioned, I wouldn’t focus on the number of results but rather that your expected items are listed highly in the rankings. The previous search could have still been broken and just giving limited results since it wasn’t doing fuzzy searching.
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One thing I noticed is that the search doesn’t work well with international titles anymore.
For example, before the update, I could search for “Anatomie d’une chute” and it would be in the first results. But now, it only founds other titles with “chute”.
The only way to find the film is to search for “Anatomy of a fall”.
@emi1964 this is now fixed, there was a bug with different types of quotes being used like ` vs ’ for example.
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I just tried looking up Jessica Biel the actress but couldn’t get her profile on the trakt app? Or maybe I had to scroll way way down?
But she at least doesn’t show up in the first “page” of the endless scrolling screen.
Good catch, the people search needs to move exact matches higher in the results. I’ll have a fix out later this week for that and results will start improving.
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