Fuzzy Search

[mammt 5]

any update on this? it's really needed

[visproduction 315]

Of interest: https://www.fusejs.io/demo.html

[ryancey 55]

Still no progress on this topic ? 

[Riptide126 24]

+1 on this, I tried searching Fantastic 4 and nothing came up because the title name is Fantastic Four. I feel having some sort of fuzzy search is necessary to make search usable.

[IAmHugh 63]

9 hours ago, Riptide126 said:

+1 on this, I tried searching Fantastic 4 and nothing came up because the title name is Fantastic Four. I feel having some sort of fuzzy search is necessary to make search usable.

Alas just like FIXING the search so one can set it to only search the particular library they're in, or when in setting ONLY finding items in settings and not searching ones media Fuzzy Search most likely won't happen. The devs seen to be beyond fuzzy (clueless) on the importance of proper search functions in an app.

[ryancey 55]

Yeah the search feature is lagging a lot behind today's standards. As usual no communication from the team.

Spoiler

Spinning the Luke-o-tron: "This is an interesting idea, thanks."

 

[IAmHugh 63]

20 hours ago, ryancey said:

Yeah the search feature is lagging a lot behind today's standards. As usual no communication from the team.

The particular function is 30 years out of date. Considering Emby is nowhere near 30 that's saying a lot.

[hspantera 8]

Hello. Emby is perfect. But just has one problem. In search for movies or series if you type one letter wrong it doesn’t find the movie. Or if you search the movie typing the name of not original title but your country tittle it doesn’t detect either. That’s the only down of Emby. Plex in search do everything of that.. you type name in what country you want and he finds it. You error one letter and he gives suggestions of movies that are close to that name. I think it’s not very hard thing to do but we users of Emby will appreciate. Search in Emby is very limited. We are in 2025 with all kinds of AI and sure it would be very useful. I think all Emby community will appreciate that. Search should be much better. Take the example of Plex. If you could make it on Emby it would be great. Only thing that Plex is better than Emby. And I think you guys can update that feature. Emby it’s better than Plex in everything. And I was a 10 year Plex user. I changed to Emby about 4 or 5 months and it’s faster, better options, better control, better remote streaming, better downloads. In resume everything it’s better and much more stable. No doubt. Only the search option is pretty bad. If you can do that I think it will become a 100% winner. If I type something on search it has to be 100% accurate. But search should be more flexible. Give suggestions, find by country name and not only by original name. If you want to raise to next lever that’s the only thing it’s missing on Emby. Test Plex search to see. And if you could do the same it would be amazing. That’s my opinion about Emby. By far the best app. Thanks.

[visproduction 315]

Online servers can be faster, optimized and more powerful to handle fuzzy searching.  I would bet that everywhere you find fuzzy search it will be online using host servers that have been optimized, load balanced, even dedicated to run these types of searches.  Emby uses a local user's workstation to provide all the features. A fuzzy search built locally is hardly ideal and I think rarely exists anywhere.  A local server would probably not get the code needed to distribute the demand, load balance or pull from a separate dedicated workstation on the network to perform all searches.  Even if this were attempted, the code required to share a load balanced second server would be considerable.  If you did the fuzzy search on the same Emby server, it would need to be throttled back to a limited bandwidth and even then it could possibly interfer with video streaming playback.  Fuzzy searches that take 20 to 40 seconds to complete have really no value.  People will exit the page before seeing a result.

See some of the technical issues here: https://www.meilisearch.com/blog/postgres-full-text-search-limitations

If you can find a fuzzy search example that works on a user's workstation and not with a dedicated host server, please do comment and list where that is.  In my opinion, you are asking for a feature that if added to user's Emby server, most users may see very heavy CPU usage per search and success will vary a lot with demand and server specs.  Even with throttling safeguards, fuzzy seach could cause new issues with video streaming playback.  Any such code would be a lot of work and prone to having many issues with each server type that you probably have to create new code for each OS.  I don't think you can push it just from dbase lookup.

I don't think fuzzy search is viable idea for user run server.  I don't think there is a solution example online that is not using the host.  I think the last combined fuzzy search feature was dropped.  I am not sure why.  Was it too demanding?  Did it not work for every user?  Maybe someone knows the answer.

[Riptide126 24]

On 8/24/2025 at 12:14 PM, visproduction said:

Even with throttling safeguards, fuzzy seach could cause new issues with video streaming playback.

Why would fuzzy search effect playback in any way?

[visproduction 315]

Rip,

I have not run any tests.  Since Fuzzy search uses Emby local server to work, it draws CPU usage and that can amount to enough that the CPU may not be able to handle all requests for transcoding.  It depends on the system and the demand.  Simple search, as it is now, hardly draws any CPU clicks, but fuzzy search takes a lot of CPU time to complete.  If you stress tested a Emby server with say 3 transcodings running and 2 fuzzy search, would this max the CPU out to 100% or not?  I"m not sure.  On some user's setup it might, on other's it may not.  Fuzzy is a lot more demanding and I think people think it's easy to run.  As I mentioned, you will find it running on host servers only and they may actually designate a separate server to run Fuzzy, because of this heavy demand issue.  Read the link I mentioned and you will find server demand mentioned. 

Edited August 26, 2025 by visproduction

[brothom 177]

On 24/08/2025 at 21:14, visproduction said:

I don't think fuzzy search is viable idea for user run server.  I don't think there is a solution example online that is not using the host.  I think the last combined fuzzy search feature was dropped.  I am not sure why.  Was it too demanding?  Did it not work for every user?  Maybe someone knows the answer.

Agreed. Keyword/dictionary search might be more applicable for local Emby Servers as an alternative. 

How that works is that keywords are generated for each media item and these have their own ranking / score. Using a dictionary (linktable) the media items are linked to their respective keywords for quicker searches. This is also how most webshops/ecommerce search implementations are natively (obviously ignoring platforms like algolia, hello retail and whatnot).

A cool thing about search dictionaries is that the rankings can be modified on the server. So I prefer the title to be more important, I could give the title a score of "100" and the description a score of "50". Each two matches in the description would amount to the same "score" as one match in the title.

Finally, adding all the scores and summing them gives you a sorting position.

[IAmHugh 63]

What is still more important is having the ability to set Emby to only search the library you are in. Same goes for searching within settings. Fix the real issue first. 

[brothom 177]

13 hours ago, CummingCowGirl said:

What is still more important is having the ability to set Emby to only search the library you are in. Same goes for searching within settings. Fix the real issue first. 

That's a different feature than what we're discussing here though and this feature would greatly increase search functionality in general, instead of a per-library basis.

[IAmHugh 63]

44 minutes ago, brothom said:

That's a different feature than what we're discussing here though and this feature would greatly increase search functionality in general, instead of a per-library basis.

Doesn't take away from the FACT that proper search should come before something that sounds like it will just be a more forgiving version of the search that we already have. I get the merits of fuzzy search, but make no mistake fixing the current search functions to have the option of either leaving as is searching everything or having it only search in the section of Emby you happen to be in is far more important.

[visproduction 315]

7 hours ago, CummingCowGirl said:

... make no mistake fixing the current search functions to have the option of either leaving as is searching everything or having it only search in the section of Emby you happen to be in is far more important.

Cowgirl,  I think you are saying searching within a library is an important feature.  Your sentence refers to a mistake = current, option = leaving as is, or option = search "where you happen to be".  Perhaps shorter sentences would help you make your points more clearly.

[IAmHugh 63]

1 hour ago, visproduction said:

Cowgirl,  I think you are saying searching within a library is an important feature.  Your sentence refers to a mistake = current, option = leaving as is, or option = search "where you happen to be".  Perhaps shorter sentences would help you make your points more clearly.

Perhaps you can better spend your time online NOT trying to correct others and failing at it miserably. 

[visproduction 315]

My comment was positive.  You took it as a negative comment.  It was not.

[IAmHugh 63]

2 hours ago, visproduction said:

My comment was positive.  You took it as a negative comment.  It was not.

You comment was RUDE and meant to be rude. Try again DUDe.

[visproduction 315]

It was a positive suggestion. Your interpretation is your opinion. I am stating my truthful intention. All my other comments on this forum are always positive, from my viewpoint.  I understand that people interpret forum postings in different ways. I do not use sarcasm.  Perhaps that is what it appeared to be.  Your responses were both accusatory.  If you look closely at my original post to you, I did not use any such accusations.  In any case, I doubt we will agree.  Enjoy the forum and have a nice weekend.

[IAmHugh 63]

4 hours ago, visproduction said:

It was a positive suggestion. Your interpretation is your opinion. I am stating my truthful intention. All my other comments on this forum are always positive, from my viewpoint.  I understand that people interpret forum postings in different ways. I do not use sarcasm.  Perhaps that is what it appeared to be.  Your responses were both accusatory.  If you look closely at my original post to you, I did not use any such accusations.  In any case, I doubt we will agree.  Enjoy the forum and have a nice weekend.

You know what it means when someone protest too much, right? And you are protesting too much. End of conversation.

[visproduction 315]

I have not protested, just made statements.  Protest defined is: "To express a strong objection".  You are doing this. I undestand that you prefer not to see this.  That's fine.  We will not need to converse again.  Enjoy your Sunday.

[TMCsw 247]

Is  @CummingCowGirl one and the same as  @Locutus64 

[ryancey 55]

@CummingCowGirlYour idea is a good one but yeah that's not the topic of this thread, which is fuzzy search. Open a new thread and I'll gladly upvote it though

[IAmHugh 63]

13 minutes ago, ryancey said:

@CummingCowGirlYour idea is a good one but yeah that's not the topic of this thread, which is fuzzy search. Open a new thread and I'll gladly upvote it though

How about going to the existing thread for common sense searching that's been linked in this thread more than once and up vote the first post. Like EVERYONE in this thread should have done already. As for my opinion not belonging in this thread it does when the other feature should be implemented first.