Up until today, I was able to use 127.0.0.1:32400/web/index.html on my PC hosting my PMS and had the old search. Now, it puts me to the new search. Any other workarounds?
I will voice support for what other people have said. If you have a large library, this new search makes it painful to find stuff. If I want to make sure I have a movie or show - for example Mobile Suit Gundam, which there are many series - then I would just search for Gundam and go to the Shows section of the search page to see which ones I had. Now, I get episode titles and movies mixed in there as well.
For the record, I don’t think anyone is saying not to have this new search for people who like it. Just have an option in settings to use the old one.
Another +1 on how much I hate the search results being stuck in the drop-down instead of loading a page of useful matches. I spend years expecting that when I hit enter it will show me a page of results, not load whatever rando thing the search results was showing.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. If you’re going to make major UI changes like that you should either warn people at the update, or offer a toggle to put things back to “Plex Classic.”
Feeling like somebody at plex favors “shiny” over “actually useful” and that’s a bad, bad trend.
The old search worked off of a vagueness of detail. I really love it that way because when you only remember one word of the title you could still find it on the results page. The new search works off of the fact that I definitively know what I am searching for. With this new search I have had to go to imdb.com multiple times to even remotely start finding some of the content that is in my own library. It is a pain to add 500 new clicks to do the same thing “enter” at the end of the word used to do. Plex is clearly not for listening to what people need and are just all out for their own irrational agenda that we got suckered into paying for.
Oh my goodness yes, I didn’t realize the last version I upgraded changed the search, but I was just trying to search for something and it’s nearly useless for a large music library. For example, I have 131 items in my library for Radiohead. If I do a search, I have no way to get to a full list of all of them any more to find something where I may not remember the name, and just want to see the list. If I go to the artist page, I don’t have any good way to view all the tracks. If I “play” the artist, the play queue doesn’t let me see the full queue (which also kinda is not cool…it just fades out at the bottom and I can’t scroll through the full thing).
And this is even worse for my classical tracks. I have tons of tracks composed by, say, Beethoven, across multiple albums, many of them where Beethoven is not the only composer on the album, and he’s certainly not the artist. If I’m looking to just see a list of everything with “beethoven”, how in the world can I get that? My only real solution is to use the command line and actually search my file system…which, c’mon, that’s just terrible that I can’t just do a search and see a list, filter the list and find what I’m looking for.
These are problems that have been solved for ages. I have tens of thousands of music tracks, and Plex is making it next to impossible to use it as the interface for viewing my collection meaningfully. And then on top of that, the commingling of other libraries in the search results just makes finding what I’m looking for even more difficult. I have no problem with Plex providing a simpler search interface for someone who doesn’t have a large library or who doesn’t ever look for anything where they don’t know the exact name of what they’re looking for, but, please give us an option to have something useful.
Seems that the focus of plex anymore is just on the future of their search and not actually trying to solve the problem they created with many loyal customers. Just so they can be all kewl and have that new discovery that is in beta work along side the poor excuse of improved searching of our own libraries. Going on 3 months and nothing but bad posts about this new search, but no resolve and only a crappy promise of resolve that hasn’t been touched. Guess I just need to forget about that money I loyally gave to a company I believed in and try to start new with a better promising company. I also believe they have probably stopped monitoring this thread because they have no good answers or internal communication about user concerns.
You’re welcome. I can provide another example for what smegadeth is talking about. I have 64 tracks in my music library (not even counting friends’ libraries) with the word tomorrow in the name. Let’s suppose I’m looking for, I dunno, picking one of them, Sting’s “Tomorrow We’ll See” off of “Brand New Day”. But I don’t remember those details. I remember that it was a soft rock track with “Tomorrow” in the name, let’s say, and that’s it. With the current drop down, there’s a good chance I don’t see that track in the list of tracks (I don’t). With a results page, for starters, I can actually see it in the list. But, also, I can see the album covers and names and as I’m scrolling through that full list of results, maybe I see the album cover or the artist or the full track name and say, “Oh, I think that’s it.” Maybe I first see Jack Johnson’s “Tomorrow Morning” and I wonder if that’s it, and I play it, and it’s not and I hit the back button and go back to the results and eventually get my way to the track in my library that I wanted to play. Without a good search results page…I’d probably have to get on google or allmusic.com and start trying to use their search to see if I can’t narrow down what I’m looking for so that I can actually pull up the track I’m interested in from my own library…instead of just doing that from the library management software I have and use.
I just want to add on to this because I’m passionate about search, in general, including in my own company. The most important filter in doing a search is not anything that is in the search engine. The most important filter is the human. We will always be better at pattern matching than the search engine. The goal of the search engine needs to be to give me tools to narrow down what I’m looking at so that my human pattern-matching can do its job. Now, obviously, it’s going to be ideal if I can jump straight to the singular result (because I enter in exactly what I want), but a great deal of the time, I don’t have the exact parameters to get there and I want and need to use my own pattern matching, and I rely on the software to enhance that. The more information that I’m trying to sift through, the more robust I want my tool to be (e.g., more filters).
I have 1373 tracks with “love” in the name (as a full word, not “lovely” or “glove”). If I know I’m looking for some track that I think had the name “love” in it, even with a results page, that’s too much. So I need extra filters. Maybe I can add a keyword “jazz” that might bring it down to 52 tracks or so (especially if it can utilize both filesystem paths and also tagged genre). Or maybe I can filter to a decade. Or…maybe I know it was on a soundtrack (76 tracks). Any of these things, they’re important. They’re not my first step, but if I want to find information, I need the ability to see it, and I need the ability to filter so I can reasonably see a small enough subset to be useful.
Please bring back the old style results page, you can not manage plex from drop down results in windows, the drop down view is nice to have but we absolutely need the results page when enter is pressed. Only having the drop down is terrible.
Exactly what eyrieowl said, but on my entire library (Music, TV Shows, Movies). Can’t ever remember specific title, but even one word on the search is no good as clearly explained.
Actually remember an exact example. Looking for “Brightburn (2019)” but I could not remember anything, but burn. No movies came up except with “burn” as the prefix. Imdb.com search and it was title number 17.
Thanks I’m not the only one finding that the “new search” is just a worst search than what we had before. With the new search I cannot run a search and then select a few results to apply something to them in batch. And they also managed to break the Shift-Home and Shift-End keyboard shortcuts in the search bar, something that works everywhere else on any computer. How can this have been rolled out to production ? Hope this is gonna be fixed soon because it’s really annoying.
This is definitely working on the hosted web appapp.plex.tv. Are you using the bundled app localhost:32400 instead? There is always a delay between the hosted app and the bundled.
Any new updates on even the possibility of a new search??? This search is getting very annoying to use and I am not liking the “Great Customer Service” that I and many others are not receiving.
My kid loves paw patrol, specifically some special episodes where they use motorbikes instead of their normal vehicles.
I wanted to add all to a collection (they are spread over several seasons) so of course i wanted to use search.
Expected behaviour was to type “moto pups” and see a results page where i could select all episodes (by selecting the first then shift selecting the last) and add to a collection as a batch.
Actual behaviour is being forced to individually add each episode one by one from the search list. Painful
The latest updates have returned a dedicated search result page.
As for your particular use case… why not use a smart collection for this purpose? You can filter your library using an advanced filter, filtering for episodes by episode titlecontains „moto pups“ and save that filter as a smart collection… this way it’ll automatically include any future episodes matching this criteria.
