I am attempting to resolve an issue where Plex Web results show nothing or very little or incomplete results when I know very well I have specific titles. For example, when I want to search for the movie Scream (1996), no results for such a movie exist on my server.
But nothing if I type Scream or Scream 1. I have to go to the full alphabetical listing of my Horror movie category and scroll or choose the letter S and find it. This is a problem with several of my titles including music artists/albums. If I have an artist in more than on folder, for example. My Ripped folder, and a Metal folder. It will only show the result for the category with fewer albums, forcing me to go scroll through the Metal folder to find the artist from an alphabetical list. The search used to be amazing before the Version 1.+ update I could just go to the horror movie folder and type the title to search and it would within a split second show all the titles with the words/letters in the title. Now it has become more difficult just to find a movie. Is there a way to fix this or do I need to wait for an update to fix it?
I am experiencing same issue since couple of weeks with my Plex Web clients. I have tested Chrome and IE. I have tested the local client and remote through Plex.tv. I am using a Synology +415 and have the 1.0.3. service installed.
The search with iOS and Smart TV clients works still well. The Web clients also worked well in the past, but something has changed since the last 1-2 updates.
My experience shows following while doing searches:
Only one movie will be found, in case there are movies with exactly same name existing in same or in different Libraries
Not all movies will be found if searching for a string which exists in multiple movies
Sometime you have to type in the full movie name to find it, abbreviations will not find it
Examples:
3. Seach for CarsCars 3D (one Library) and Cars (other Library) will return only one movie
4. Search for Gold will return couple movies with the name Gold, but not GoldenEye. Search for GoldenEye will return GoldenEye
5. Search for Cleopatra will return Cleopatra in one Library, but not in in the second, even the names are same. Changing the name of one to something else will find both movies if shared for.
6. Changing the name of one Cleoptra movie to Cleoptras does not help. It still finds only the first Cleopatra movie. Searching for Cleoptras will find the movie.
This means there is an issue in the Web search and not in the file metadata. The Web search does a XOR or exempts some results.
This is really strange and is not helping managing the database and metadata. Can you please fix it.
Same issue here. I was thinking it was a database indexing issue with my specific install, but it sounds more like they screwed up the search functionality in a recent update.
same problem for me. Searching for a movie title works in iOS and appleTV apps. Same search via web browser doesn’t work. No rhyme or reason why some searches work and others don’t with the web app.
Interesting, it has been a month since I posted and several months for the OP and no one from the dev or support team has even commented at all? I don’t hold out much hope as they still haven’t even made the Windows version run as service instead of interactive as the task bar icon, which is completely unnecessary.
I could probably go into the code and database and figure it out, but I shouldn’t have to use my time doing that for a paid product.
At this point it has also been crashing a lot here lately, once or twice a day and no crash dumps to even see what the issue is for it.
It is becoming super frustrating. I would just switch to the Linux version, but it has a whole other set of issues. I may just be starting to push the limits of what Plex can handle for a single instance though so my issues might be a special case.
Yours is probably just being limited in the autocomplete results. Click “Show more results…” and see if they are all there when you click the little slider arrow.
Mine only shows 1 movie though for Star Trek as well when there are 14 so that can’t be a coincidence.
What it boils down to is that the search for Windows Plex server is broken regardless of what client you use. I can do the same search against the same library on Linux and it works fine.
I can confirm as of Version 1.2.2.2857 the Plex Windows search is now working properly so they obviously fixed something and it magically started working again. A simple hey, we fixed that in x would have been nice. Oh well.
That is correct, they did fix “something”, but its only a minor improvement! The results are still limited to only so many. I have dozens of movies with the word ‘Blood’ in it, but the search results only display 10. Also, they still took away my favorite feature, the ability to instantly pull up results that match while I type within libraries rather than the entire database. The search used to be amazing before the Version 1.+ update I could just go to the horror movie library and type the title to search and it would within a split second show all the titles with the words/letters anywhere in the title. Now it has become more difficult just to find a movie.
Exactly the same issue running search on Android App with PMS on QNAP NAS Linux server. Definitely frustrating/disappointing since in general the search on Plex has been VERY strong in the past.
@Jusedawg said:
Yours is probably just being limited in the autocomplete results. Click “Show more results…” and see if they are all there when you click the little slider arrow.
Mine only shows 1 movie though for Star Trek as well when there are 14 so that can’t be a coincidence.
What it boils down to is that the search for Windows Plex server is broken regardless of what client you use. I can do the same search against the same library on Linux and it works fine.
Show more results worked for me Version 1.5.5.3634 running on unRAID server, thanks for that pointer it was easy to miss.
I agree the search is badly broken/designed especially when you consider it should be basic media server functionality.
