Life long Plex Sub here and one thing that seems to of been largely ignored for a long period of time now is the Plex search results are highly limited. More flexible and vast search results are needed.
A simple example is if you type in fantastic four you’ll get the two fantastic four movies but won’t get results for “fantastic 4”.
The search must also begin to search the content within movies, shows, and episodes in maybe a more of an advanced search section.
One issue is if you have all the Marvel Batman animated movies and which there are a lot of you barely get full search results on most devices.
Yes this includes when you click more sources and go to the search page not the search dropdown although both require a more robust solution such as extending the search bar on click and have it animated then have more room to display more results in a more compact side by side poster view in addition to the list view.
For large libraries the search results are minimal and as a life long dev I know this isn’t so complicated to write some additional queries that look for extra content with slight matches after the strict and most relevant matches complete and are shown first.
A query that looks for slight comparisons after would be great even if I have to tick a check box or get a more advanced search just to browse and or display the max amount of relevant content.
I noticed that search results have varied across devices as well. Which is fine to a degree for lower end devices but many can certainly take far more results to display.
Another perk would be if the search results could be shown in a grid pattern instead of a horizontal view or at least an expand option to more easily go through the results that return a large amount of posters.
Truly this can be a very simple fix and I’d assist in the code for it for you if that were allowed.
+1 for this.
I’m also having issues with searches.
It also seems that searching using the original title (which is in English), sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.
Really annoying.
Pretty sure this wasn’t an issue a few months ago, I think it’s one of the latest updates that broke it.
I came here looking for a solution to the same issue. I want to be sure my library is complete, so sometimes I search for a movie, and if it doesn’t come up on a search (press enter, not just the quick-hits that pop up while typing) then I get the movie. Quite a few times, I get a movie, but I already have it.
Just now, I tried to find the name of the movie Snatch, but all I could remember was Brad Pitt. Upon a search for “Brad Pitt”, I get 2 movie results, Ad Astra and World War Z, but many other movies in my library don’t show; Snatch, Fight Club, Meet Joe Black, Mr and Mrs Smith come quickly to mind. Why are my search results not complete? Each of these movies are matched correctly, and Pitt is listed in the cast of each, so why doesn’t search pull it up?
As mentioned above, at least one portion of the search indexing is rebuilt during database optimization. Try Optimizing and see if anything changes.
If not -
Share Logs
How big is your DB?
There are situations where Plex doesn’t consider “minor billing” actor roles, but I don’t think those would apply here. You’re describing headlining actors.
I’m not familiar with optimization, but in the support article, it seems like something you only do to a few files at a time, maybe to make them play more smoothly? I have over 3,000 movies in my main library, plus another few hundred in smaller libraries, and over 1,000 tv episodes. I don’t think optimizing my whole collection for the sake of better search results would be sensible, but I might not understand well.
FYI, all of the feature films are in the same, main library, which I’ve been building for years, and had on plex for about 3 years now. The films in question have been in my library for a long time, not recently added. Also, as I tried to point out, when looking at the movie info in Plex, Brad Pitt is listed with a little photo as a cast member in each of these films, so Plex should know to connect him to them when searching.
