Media searches not honoring articles in title (eg; the)

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
42

not sure what your asking re dbrepair… i ran the three options you suggested in the order you suggested and they all completed successfully (and did make plex much snappier : )

as for “the first word”

well like i said in the first post… its ANY common world regardless of whether its the first word…

ie- a search for gone with the wind gets the 20 second no results time out

but a search for gone wind gives the hit instantly…

a search for conan the barbarian gives the 20 second timeout to a no results page

take out the ‘the’ and i get an instant hit/result for it : ) : (

43

Thanks… I’m being pedantic (sorry).

I’m about to test against my QA TV Episode library.

I’m installing 1.30.1 and letting it do all its changes

1 Like
44

“The” is an article, not an adjective. :slight_smile:

Shot in the dark, but would dropping the database indexes and letting Plex Media Server recreate them help instead of just running a REINDEX command?

Does it make any difference if you search only “Movies and TV” or only “Music” instead of “All” (dropdown on the left)? Do you have other severs selected or just your own server (dropdown on the right)?

45

thanks for all your hard work : )

though i really think it MUST have something to do with a library with over half a million items in it ahaha… if your making a test server from scratch… i figure it will take a while to import half a million items… to really test… ahaha…

46

There is a way to only search a single library through the API which will help verify if the new library with only a few items works.

http://IP-ADDRESS:32400/hubs/search?sectionId=##&query=the+rookie&X-Plex-Token=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

where ## is the ID of the library and XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX is your token.

Try the API with both library sections (big one and new one with the few items).

47

how can you tell a library’s section id?

and where do you find the token?

48

Easiest way to find the library ID is to look at your browser URL when you go into a library. It will be the number after source=##.

Plex token:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/204059436-finding-an-authentication-token-x-plex-token/

49

ok i did that with the test library section number and the plex token inserted into that url and it times out after 20 seconds and gives me an error

“This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.”

and an xml page

50

So “The Rookie” isn’t shown in the XML below?

But if it’s still timing out then that would lead to library size being irrelevant since it still happens for the small library. More likely some database index problem.es

Edit: It could still be an overall size/number of items issue, just not the specific library size.

51

yea i’ve always thought it must have to do with the number of items in the library… like 600k plus has to be an outlier… it must have something to do with the sheer number of entries with the common words in them (the, and, of etc)

its just weird that searches for the same item without the common word, delivers instant results before i can even finish typing the words : )

52

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

54

@jaquestati

I suspect you’ve given up on search working correctly but I have some news.

  1. They did a lot of work on searches
  2. It’s not ready for PrimeTime (users) yet.
  3. If you’re willing, We can make arrangements for me to have a copy of your DB or list of files (in pathname format)
  4. From there. I will create a dummy-copy of your server and test the new search code, with the devs there, against the new Plex/web search code.
2 Likes
55

I can confirm the upcoming search improvements are handling the case of The Rookie and Rookie both returning results.

edit: gone with the wind and gone wind also return correct results.

2 Likes
57

Hello there,

Just like jaquestati, I have a MASSIVE library (but not as big for movies or TV shows) and my search bar started ignoring articles completely a few months ago.

At first I thought it was the new search bar that was the culprit so I waited for a fix. No big deal and I can still search for a specific content directly into my libraries if necessary.

But yesterday I searched for an old movie that we have in common with a friend on our respective servers and the search bar found it on my friend’s server but not on mine.
Unless I remove any article from the search… then it’s instantaneous.

I remembered then that I had imported all my music (over 500k items) from my selfhosted Airsonic into Plex at the same time because Plexamp is just way too good to be ignored.
To me, this must be the real culprit.

According to many answers on this topic, it has nothing to do with size but I can’t find anything else to explain it.

Creating a new and fresh library with problematic content doesn’t show on Search with articles.
Creating a whole new Plex server solves this.

I don’t know what to do from here.
Can it be fixed? Delete my music from Plex? Move it to a second Plex instance?

58

Further testing today, I don’t know if it helps but I found out there is no problem with search on Plexamp. It works flawlessly and manage to find titles even with articles in no time.

Weird because my music library is, by very far, my biggest library. And Plexamp has no problem to dig in it. Only regular Plex clients are concerned by this in my case.

For example, If I am looking for “Born to Be Alive”. I need to write “born alive” to get a result on Plex but I can write it correctly on Plexamp.

My server is on Docker (Unraid) Version 1.32.7.7621

59

I too have been having this issue for some months now, and have tried a DB rebuild in my troubleshooting efforts. Large DB. Running latest version of PMS on Ubuntu.

I do not want to start from scratch to fix this bug :frowning:

Oddly enough, my problem isn’t with the word “the” it’s with the word “A”. Again, doesn’t matter if it’s at the beginning of the title or somewhere else, I must omit the word “A” to get the hit in the search. There may be other articles, but that’s the one I keep noticing the “bug” in. I’ve been working around this bug, but it’s annoying when family tell me we don’t have a movie and I have to say “take the A out and search again!”.