Fuzzy Search

[embyuser24 36]

Hi,

 

The current implementation of Emby search is very basic. Based on what I can tell, it only matches exact strings in the same exact order.

 

Example: "Mission: Impossible"

In this example the following queries will return a positive match

• Possible
• Impossible
• Mission
• Mission: Impossible

And the following queries will not return anything at all (The worst offenders are highlighted)

• Mission Impossible
• Missoin: Imposible
• Imposible
• Impossible Mission
• Mission : Impossible
• Mission     Impossible

Another example would be "Mr. Robot" where if the dot is missing, nothing is returned or in general terms any variation of any string that is not an exact match will not return anything at all. Let's not even attempt to try a title like "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.".

 

This makes the search difficult to use and at times even frustrating. As the examples above show, the major theme is special characters and punctuation and they can probably be bypassed by just ignoring them, which might or might not cause other problems in the process. This problem also affects titles that have letters with diacritical marks or glyphs such as "Amélie" and "Æon Flux", if you can't type them exactly, you can't find them.

 

In my opinion a better attempt would be to use a difference string matching algorithm such as Levenshtein distance, you can then define an acceptable threshold and return the closest matches.

 

I found a couple of C# projects that implement this and might be useful as a starting point. 

 

• FuzzyWuzzy, a port of Python project in C#. https://github.com/BoomTownRoi/BoomTown.FuzzySharp
• FuzzyString. Has some additional string comparison algorithms too. https://github.com/kdjones/fuzzystring

 

Thanks.

 

[Luke 32468]

Hi yes, it's something we're interested in for the future. thanks.

[legallink 183]

+1 on this.

[legallink 183]

+1 on this.

[invertedknife 13]

+1 on this

[adrianwi 178]

+100

[embyuser24 36]

The new search improvements in v4.0 are great and very welcomed!

 

Are there any plans for implementing nearest match searches in cases of misspelled words/phrases?

[Luke 32468]

It's possible for the future. Thanks !

[Bottles51 47]

Can we please have the apostrophe excluded in the web browser searches. It is easy to forget adding one in especially when pasting in a title. You may have the title and forget to add the apostrophe and not realize it.

[Luke 32468]

HI, yes this is something that needs to be improved. Thanks.

[Jägs 44]

I'd just like to expand the scope on this a bit since the original request was video specific, but with improvements made to the music side of the shop, it'd be great to include artist and title (or album) in the search as well, as I outline here: