Why doesn't Search find titles in Movies & Shows

General Discussions
1

I was chatting with a friend this evening, and the movie Shortbus came up in conversation. I thought, “Let me see if I can find it on Plex”, so I typed it into the Search box, but the movie wasn’t found. It did, however, return a list of 7 people, presumably affiliated with the movie. That’s a start.

Digging further, I went to JustWatch.com and I see that the title streams on a number of services, including Plex. If I click the link, https://watch.plex.tv/watch/movie/shortbus, sure enough, the movie plays in my browser. Yay!

Question, then: Why does Search not return this result if it’s clearly available to stream via Plex?

I went to Movies & Shows in Plex and just randomly picked a few of the titles that were available to stream there. I searched for those in Search, with no matches. Hotel Artemis. Prozac Nation. When Calls The Heart. Blue Ridge. Apparently NONE of the content in Movies & Shows, AVAILABLE ON PLEX, show up in Plex’s search results. Huh?

I watched the October '23 Plex Pro Week video from Jason Williams (https://www.plex.tv/blog/plex-pro-week-23-lets-talk-about-search-baby) touting all the improvements in Search, but I didn’t really pick up on whether Search was supposed to find content in Movies & Shows, so can anyone clarify? Clearly it does not for me. Then the next obvious question is how would one search for content in Movies & Shows aside from just scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of titles?

Thanks, all!

2

It seems to be working for me…

Web app:

Android TV app (Fire Stick):

Not able to reproduce the issue. I looked up every title you mentioned with no issue on the Fire Stick. You’ll need to give more info, like what the client is, the specific version of the Plex client, are you on a Managed User profile… Try unplugging power on the device the client is on for 30 seconds to reboot things. Or maybe try a reinstall of the client app. And if no change, Plex will need logs that include the time you were performing the search.

3

Did you disable Free to watch on Plex and/or More Ways to watch search results in the search bar settings?

( setting on the right side of the search bar in web app. the two lines with circles on them next to the X)

1 Like
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Ahhh, thank you both for the input. I don’t recall ever changing my search settings (I rarely use it), but the two options in the search bar settings were indeed disabled. Problem solved!

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