Server Version#: 1.28.0.5973
Player Version#: 4.86.1
I see the “full” search results page is back, so thanks for that. It seems mostly unchanged, but, where results per category were limited to 30 in the past, now a search that should return over 100 music tracks only reports 28. I’m simply searching the artist name “Enya.”
Another search, “The Manhattan Transfer,” or even just “Manhattan,” only returns 17 tracks, when there are more than 100.
Has the 30-item limit been reduced?
Think something odd may be happening. I was not aware of any intention to reduce. I just searched for “johnny cash” and got back 30 tracks in results from my server. I’ll try to find out what is up.
It’s not limited to tracks. Search for samuel l jackson in the full search page and only a subset of results are returned.
Hmm, curiouser and curiouser. I have one artist with one album, which has 15 tracks. Searching for any part, or all of the artist name (“The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem”), both the dropdown and the full Search page show 1 artist, 1 album, and NO tracks.
These are all fully tagged tracks, BTW, and Plex is configured to prefer local metadata.
Most certainly a limit of 30… here is an entry from the logs and you can clearly see a total limit of 30 is imposed …
Completed: [192.168.1.3:57034] 200 GET /hubs/search?query=samuel%20l%20jackson&limit=30&includeCollections=1&includeExternalMedia=1 (16 live) TLS GZIP 201ms 15029 bytes (pipelined: 6)
Oh so it looks like the 30 limit is being applied to each search result section. so there will be 30 results in “Media Libraries” that should be split up in multiple rows. Like 1 result for actor then 29 movies when i searched for Samuel Jackson.
I know the old results has a limit of 30 as well.
Anyway not sure if that was intended or not, I’ll pass this along. thanks for pointing it out.
There will always need to be some limit, the search endpoint is not paginated and can’t be with out a significant refactor to how search works.
Plex can up the limit, but there will always be a cap, thus it will never be “all results” unless it becomes paginated.
Then it shouldn’t be labeled “View all results” until it is. 
There is a difference between the server API limit and the UI search page limit. The API call to /hubs/search?limit=30 is applying the results per hub. i.e. 30 artists, 30 albums, 30 tracks, not a global 30. Look at the size attribute for each hub, it can go up to 30 results.
The Plex Web UI search results page is then cutting down all the results (which there are more than 30) down to 30 total results. This is purely a Plex Web UI issue and not a server API issue.
You can clearly see the difference between the hosted Plex Web (Version 4.86.1) and the local Plex Web (Version 4.84.1) search results page (/search?query=<some text string>). Both versions of Plex Web use the same server /hubs/search?limit=30 API query. The older search results page just shows all items from all hubs (still limited to 30 per hub), but the new search results page cuts it to a total 30.
I see this now. It appears to be limiting the total of artists + albums + tracks + videos, etc. to 30. I’m almost certain that was not the case before the new search was implemented and the results page was removed. The same search for “enya,” for example showed the 1 artist, 12 albums, and 30 tracks.
There seem to be other changes, too. With Enya, it seems to be showing only the album where “Enya” is in the album title (The Very Best of Enya), rather than all the albums by Enya. I don’t think that was the case before.
You shouldn’t get tracks unless the search term is in the track name. We don’t search for contributing artist if that is what you were expecting.
Fully agree!
All I was trying to do was to clearly that this endpoint doesn’t support pagination, so will not work how people want this page to work until it does. My last understanding of this endpoint was that pagination would be very difficult, and wasn’t on the roadmap.
I’m not suggesting to get rid of the limit (per hub) in the API call. The old version of Plex Web already had that limit (per hub) in place. Just that on the front end Plex Web side, it should not be cutting the total number of results down to the limit a second time.
Edit: Most users will be happy with a limit of 30 per hub since that just restores the same behaviour as the previous Plex Web versions.
That doesn’t seem to be true. In the screenshot below, the search term is “enya,” and the returned tracks do not have “enya” in the track titles. In the first three tracks returned, the Track Artist is Enya, and the Album Artist is either Howard Shore or Various Artists:
Huh. Yeah. It seems to be inconsistent. Some work and some don’t.
I’m also noticing that the Search field is no longer keeping up-to-date with recent searches.
These Recent Searches are weeks old, but the searches I’ve been doing today are not listed:
Edit: It seems that the search is added to history only if I select an item from the dropdown results. However, selecting “View all results” does not update the search history.
The Results page isn’t always showing categories in a consistent order. Some searches list Artists, then Albums, then Tracks. Another search lists Videos, then Artists, then Tracks, then Albums. I don’t know why the presence of a video should change the order of the other categories.
Search History will only show up after you’ve selected a result. So if you’re searching and just looking at results without selecting one, then that query will not show in the Search History (Recent Searches).
It seems non-intuitive that “View all results” should not do the same. A minor point, though.
Thanks for the additional detail. This issue has been raised internally.
