I went to the browser I’m logged into plex with just to Heart this. If you had the option to click to the old view after your preliminary search it would work. It looks nice, and I could see when it would be nice to have, but it lost the working functionality of the old search.
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Another user adding to the request to bring back access to the old search results page. Not necessarily remove the updated search function but just give me a way to get the old one back for specific request.
Also adding my use case.
I have a friend who really likes cheetahs. I managed to pick up a few shows/movies from various PBS and BBC nature shows. I wanted to bring them all together for her in a single collection but I no longer can. Without the full page list of the results I can no longer select multiple shows/movies that come back after my search for the keyword cheetah. This means I now have to keep redoing the search and updating them to the collection one by one.
But also want to say in my experience I’ve been loving having Plex to work with. it makes finding my movies and TV shows much easier 
: 
Sorry to hear that this has made collection creation more difficult. While we’re waiting for the return of the results page, it might be quicker to use the advanced filtering in those specific libraries to build out your collection. Hope that helps.
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Oof that modal isn’t helpful at all. This issue has already been raised but this example really highlights the issue. Sorry and thank you for reporting. Plex’s handling of multiple editions needs some love (not just in search) and hopefully we’ll see that coming soon.
Now to find all 15 editions…
@RealJerk your previous versions may also be stored in your Plex Data Directory. ...\Plex Media Server\Updates
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glad the results page is coming back : )
yea i would have had to roll back to a previous beta because the new search is unusable for me ahaha (i have multiple versions of the same movies in different libraries for various reasons… and without the results page there was no way to see them in search : (
alas when the results page comes back i probably still won’t be able to upgrade (having to use an old beta anyways because of the samsung tv audio cutout problem… hahaha… : ) : (
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Can’t agree enough with this.
Not being able to open Search Results in their own screen (and being limited to the very small dropdown window) is a huge issue for my maintenance workflow and makes using the desktop app suddenly very unpleasant.
I see lots of good with the new search tool but being restricted to the dropdown window is a major oversight in my opinion.
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@Atomatth Thanks but there wasn’t any previous versions available for the windows Player app (not Server) located in C:\Program Files\Plex\Plex
Fingers crossed the search results page can be implemented soon, appreciate the Plex staff responses. 
Thank you, I have so many customized libraries and 10’s of thousands of video files and the new approach simply does NOT work. now to determine if restoring an older version is required until the release, but less secure… /sigh
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Where is the new search falling short or impeding you from getting to what you want to watch? The more examples the better. How did you use the results page before?
I never use the search to look for something to watch, but rather to manage my library. For example, with over 40 Avenger’s movies I title them in order (chronologically) so If we watch them it’s simple to view in order. With a new page opened after searching for “Avengers [Enter]”, all movies show up and I can select and manage. Another example is I keep hundreds of teaching videos in a specific folder structure and the search function helps me pull up series or topics but only if a new search window is displayed. The current view of typing in a search and dropdown options are provided, I can only hunt 'n peck for one at a time, which takes a VERY long time.
Sometimes features are good, but we should have options of maintaining the current interface we’ve grown to love rather than being forced into other ways someone decided we all MUST utilize. I dislike change and if weren’t a security professional, would likely be on a very outdated version now…
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Agreed! I too put in many customized versions in my library and put specials in my preferred order. The new search function simply does not work for me! we need options, not creators forcing changes on us like Apple/Mac/Windows/[insert mega-corp here]
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I used the results page…
To easily distinguish between actors with similar names. The headshot on the dropdown list is so small on my laptop’s screen that it’s sometimes hard to tell who is who.
To help easily find specific types of films starring actors. For example, let’s take Clint Eastwood - he’s been in westerns, psychological thrillers, crime dramas, action movies, etc. I’ve split my library into genres because once you reach thousands of movies, it’s a lot easier to navigate.
So let’s say I want to watch a western I haven’t seen before with Clint Eastwood. I’m not going to go into the actual library and use the filter and scroll down the humongous list of people (just the A’s alone is ridiculous - be even worse if I’m looking for Robert De Niro or Sharon Stone). I’m going to type Clint Eastwood, hit enter, and then go to Westerns.
With the new search, I can’t do that. The search doesn’t even tell you which library a film is in, and doesn’t even appear to be in any particular order. So a rather simple process has been turned into a scrolling nightmare, and once again, like the headshot issue, the cover art is so tiny that it’s very difficult to make out enough detail in a poster to know whether something is a western or not.
I’ll be honest, it already bugged me that the results page would only ever return a single row of movies for a particular actor, rather than returning a row for each movie library they were found in… but not just being able to search for the actor and click the library is much worse.
Then, much like DragonCue, I have a lot of old videos that aren’t movies and TV shows, so aren’t going to match to anything in an agent. Originally, I put these in assorted ‘video’ libraries but eventually, I discovered Tiny Media Manager and its associated agent for Plex - so I’ve been able, slowly, to start taking these out of the video library and putting them in ‘Movie-like’ libraries with metadata.
It used to be quite simple to use the results page to see what was still in the Video library. I could use a search term and it’d list everything that matched that term - and what I’d see is the videos that match the term in both the video libraries and the libraries where I’ve put the metadata’d versions. That’s not happening with this search. All the results are piled together in no particular order and if I haven’t yet run a cleanup to remove the original ‘video’ library ones, I could be getting a big list of dead links.
And then I’ve got some items that end up being mismatched as duplicates. So the original fix for this was to split them apart, run a search for the name, hit enter so they’re both side by side and then just check which is which from the Get Info and re-match the incorrect one. Now the new search doesn’t make this impossible, just more finnicky.
Why? Well first when you click ‘Get Info’ to check which is which, the dropdown closes when you close the Get Info so you have to open it up again. Second, there is no ‘Fix Match’ option from the dropdown menu, so you have to click into the item to do it which you didn’t have to do from the Results page.
Now, you can argue the ability to do this is still there, but any UI change that requires extra clicks to do the same thing isn’t a good change.
And perhaps the pettiest complaint - why doesn’t SHIFT+HOME highlight the previous search so you can just type something new? Why do I have to backspace out the previous search before I can do a new one?
I’m not against the new dropdown but I do want the ability to hit enter and get that results page back because for a lot of things that I do, it’s quicker and more convenient.
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Just returning to this because having just played with it some more, I can see that my ‘Clint Eastwood’ complaint isn’t actually quite the nuisance I thought it was. For whatever reason, some actors are appearing at the bottom of search results (below lists of movies with them - hence the scrolling) but most actors are appearing at the top. I imagine the latter behaviour is the intended behaviour, so I’ll have to try and figure out what is causing the occasional incidences of the former behaviour.
Ironically, Clint is one of those appearing correctly at the top of the results. Probably shouldn’t have based my example on a random name!
However, I have found another minor annoyance. This might not be a problem for a lot of people, I admit, but I’ve got photo albums that share the same name as movies or actors. Now on the old results page, photo album link matches were always at the top of that page. When it was an actor, it was pretty cool - it was kinda like a profile page you might find for them, with photos, movies, TV shows, etc. I digress…
But when ‘All’ is selected, photo albums aren’t shown in the dropdown results. I’ve even checked it’s not just giving preference to movies/TV by searching for a photo album that has a wholly unique name. It’s not shown as a result. To find the photo albums, you have to select Photos first. I don’t actually mind having the option to specify I’m looking for a photoset. In fact, I’d be happy if we could expand this specific search option to specific libraries and not just Movies/TV. But by having this as the only option, it does occasionally become part of the extra click issue.
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Photos with exact matching not returning results has been mentioned and the issue has been raised. Exact match should usually return the intended result. Thanks again for your feedback.
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@Atomatth , can you tell us what stories or issues Plex is trying to fix with the new search? What was wrong with the old search? There are a lot of smart and experienced users and developers on this board that can likely help you to come up with a solution.
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My main concerns are:
- Differentiating between multiple versions of a film is impossible, even if you’ve meticulously split and labeled them
- See fewer results at once since it’s a small window instead of an entire screen
- No longer able to open a dedicated tab/page for a specific search task
- Unclear why this was changed in the first place, or at least before it had reached feature parity with the UI components being replaced
In general, I would prefer to see more information, rather than less, since a search is quite literally seeking information. For instance, I have to look through multiple seemingly identical ‘sources’ to see all the movies from one person, instead of seeing them all at once.
Clint Eastwood has been used before in this thread as an example, and is extra useful since he is both an Actor and Director.
This is what I see currently when I search for him:
This is what I see both when I click his face, and when I click +3:
Instead, it would be great if we could see all of his movies at once in a single screen, with them split into sections by actor/director, optionally per-server or merged together. Maybe a menu similar to the one in that screenshot could appear when activated by only by the +3 button in the result but the default option when clicking his face was a merged view of all his media across servers, since the latter is far more useful when searching for an actor.
It is also really unclear why there are multiple identical results for a single Actor on a single Server, can these be automatically merged or at least some indication of what each one represents? Director/Actor is clearly indicated but why Actor and then Actor again?
Investments in usability enhancements like better fuzzy search results for less-than-perfect spelling/typos would be greatly appreciated since it makes search much less useful to users:
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The change in search is part of a larger effort that is still being finalized. All of our supported platforms received an update to search as part of this effort. Though Web is certainly a unique platform and with that needs special considerations and changes that differ from the other platforms. Please continue to provide feedback.
Thanks. Makes sense. Thanks for realizing the web and desktop may need to be different than mobile
Could Continue Watching from within a TV Library returns `Not found` be caused by the recent search updates to the webui?
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I find it particularly irritating that a search for “Star Wars” yields all manner of results in the presented dropdown, but hitting enter asks for a specific server, and upon selection only returns results for one specific movie. It used to catch them all.
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