Streamlined Music Search Results – Songs Filtering

[user24 90]

Request:

Remove Songs from search results, in the Songs menu tab, where all or part of the search term is contained in the Album title AND NOT contained in the Song title.

Some Background Info:

When searching for a specific Song, and all of the search term is contained in the Album title, then all the Songs on that Album are returned as search results that are usually not relevant to the intended search query. These unwanted Song results cannot be filtered out using relevant menu tabs:

• Using the Albums tab filters out all of the Songs results, leaving only the Albums containing the search term, as expected.
• Using the Songs tab, while now showing only Songs, still shows the unwanted results where the search term is the parent Album.
• Using the Songs tab, there are also outlier results still shown where part of the search term is in the parent Album and part in the Song.

A Specific Search Example:

A search for Green River gives the following Top Results:

 

 

 

 

 

The first row shows expected results, except for the River of Tears Song by Bonnie Raitt. Further investigation of this result finds that the Album name is Green Light. Therefore it is an outlier result, but Emby does not know I am searching for a Song yet, so I can accept this result being in the Top Results menu tab. It all makes sense, so far...

The second row shows expected results except for the Lodi and Commotion songs. As the parent Album is Green River these all-inclusive results also make sense with this menu tab.

I would now expect that filtering by either Albums or Songs would narrow down the search results accordingly, to show only Albums containing the search term OR only Songs containing the search term. (I would expect the combined AND results to filtered out.)

The Albums tab gives the following expected result:

Only one Green River album is shown. This filtering makes complete sense. No other Albums are shown even though there are many other Albums in the music library that contain the child Green River song. (The covers of these albums can be seen in the Top Results image above.)

The Songs tab gives the following unexpected results:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only Songs are shown, BUT the three Songs that do NOT fully contain Green River in their Song title are still shown – River of Tears, Lodi and Commotion.

The search results are therefore still including the parent Album information in the Songs menu tab. Because I am in this menu tab, Emby should now know that Songs are the focus and exclude all Songs that are NOT Green River.

With my Green River example above, there is only one full Album involved. (My search actually returns 45 Songs in total, of which 13 are unwanted, from the Green River album.)  If a typical Album has 10 Songs, then there could be up to 10 irrelevant Song results that cannot be filtered out, so perhaps not too bad to deal with. However, if a Song search resulted in 10 Albums being returned (yes, I have tried it) then there could be potentially up to 100 irrelevant Song results! Couple this with the Song search list view in Emby 4.8 (compared to grid view in 4.7) and that means a lot of scrolling past irrelevant results. Also, if search is limited to the number of results it returns (I don't know?), then irrelevant results that cannot be filtered out could potentially be stopping other relevant results from being shown?

There will always be outlier results with any search system, but it Emby can filter out child Song info from Album search results, is it also possible for Emby to filter out parent Album info from Song search results? All search results could perhaps still remain in the Top Results tab.

I expect this won’t be a major priority and isn’t of great concern to me, but it is something I happened to come across and perhaps could be looked at when other search improvements are being implemented.

I hope this all makes sense and is understandable? Does anyone else get the same type of results? Does it matter?

Comments and feedback most welcome!

Edited February 14 by Abobader
Remove empty space

[Luke 37083]

HI, yes this has come up before, although many find it helpful to see the results matched by album included.