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Fuzzy Search


embyuser24

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embyuser24

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. 

 

 

Thanks.

 

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  • 6 months later...
embyuser24

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?

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  • 3 years later...
Bottles51

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.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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:

 

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  • 7 months later...

Taking another look at this, this feature request was created prior to Emby Server switching to full text searching in it's database, and as a result, many of the examples in the first post have been solved for the past several years. Even the diacritical marks have long been solved where Amélie can be located by searching either Amélie or Amelie.

The open issues are currently misspellings (fuzzy), and certain characters such as single quotes and periods that require the person searching to enter their search term exactly as it appears in the database.

In the upcoming 4.8 server release, we'll handle these characters better so that it won't matter how you're searching.

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Just so I'm clear:  the improvements to search do not include the ability to search artist/composer + title (e.g., "Miles Davis Autumn Leaves"), correct?

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3 hours ago, Jägs said:

Just so I'm clear:  the improvements to search do not include the ability to search artist/composer + title (e.g., "Miles Davis Autumn Leaves"), correct?

Correct, however there are some other nice improvements you may enjoy.

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  • 4 weeks later...
donkorleone

I'm running 4.8.0.46, thanks for the improvements!

Don't want to keep this open forever, but I'm adding my use case. For a video with the name, say "Vacation.Video.2023-07-13.Rome.1" if I search for "Rome," then I don't get back the item. I can technically go and bulk edit metadata, but I have hundreds of these files and lots are with a similar naming convention.

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4 minutes ago, donkorleone said:

I'm running 4.8.0.46, thanks for the improvements!

Don't want to keep this open forever, but I'm adding my use case. For a video with the name, say "Vacation.Video.2023-07-13.Rome.1" if I search for "Rome," then I don't get back the item. I can technically go and bulk edit metadata, but I have hundreds of these files and lots are with a similar naming convention.

What is the title of the item in the server?

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  • 4 months later...
ryancey

Any news on this feature? Looks like I hasn't made it to the 4.8 release and yet seems pretty expectable nowadays on a library manager. Thanks!

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9 hours ago, ryancey said:

Any news on this feature? Looks like I hasn't made it to the 4.8 release and yet seems pretty expectable nowadays on a library manager. Thanks!

Hi, yes we are continuing to work on improving search. Thanks for the feedback.

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