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Question about searching

PostPosted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 12:36 am
by karlitoes
Hi all,

Sindre, I love Subsonic - this is hands down the best, smoothest music server from among the now many I've tried.

That said, I'm having trouble with searches. When I search in the artist field for, say, "Beat" I would expect to get just a few hits for those artists with a name that includes "Beat", like The Beatles, and the English Beat. But instead, I get hundreds of songs, mostly from the Beatles. I have to page through all the songs to find other artists that match "Beat".

Am I doing something wrong? Like, is there a preference where I can make the query to the database limit results to the specific field of the query (in this case, to return artist matches, NOT all the songs that correspond to the artists that match).

Thanks much,

Karl

p.s., I'm running Subsonic 3.7 (build 898) on a linux machine (Crunchbang) running Apache Tomcat/5.5, java 1.6.0_0.

PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 2:53 am
by mixmaster
remove Beat from the search all field and put it only in the search artist field on the results page.
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Question about searching - reply

PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 3:43 pm
by karlitoes
HI again, Mixmaster and thanks for your note.

The issue is that when I put "Beat" into the artist field on the search interface -- and leave the 'all' field blank -- I still get dozens of song hits.

The search appears to result from a query for songs where artist includes "beat". It would be more sensible, to me at least, for the search query to request hits for the field for which the user has entered information -- in this case, a query for artists where name includes "beat".

If someone entered information into more than one field, it would be a composite query with an AND operator.

Them's my 2 cents from a user preference perspective. Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer and can't contemplate whether this change is difficult to implement or not. Sindre?

Karl

Better search would be great.

PostPosted: Sat Aug 15, 2009 8:41 am
by GavinMcGimpsey
I agree that having a list of songs alone is very inconvenient when searching. If you search for artists, it should come up with artists; albums with albums, etc.

Also, and I suspect easier to implement, it would be nice to have a direct link to advanced search.

PostPosted: Sat Aug 15, 2009 10:54 am
by flacflac
I guess the search limitation comes from the fact that subsonic is using a folder-based design. Most people prefer this, and I guess if you had a folder for "Beatles, The" it would possibly solve your problem.


Also, and I suspect easier to implement, it would be nice to have a direct link to advanced search.


You can simply implement this yourself by putting a link into your welcome message on the side.

Just put in:

Code: Select all
{link:Advanced Search|http://yourserver:yourport/subsonic/search.view}


ff