Search

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Revision as of 00:32, 26 March 2010 by BrianSchweitzer (talk | contribs)
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Advanced Search Form

Status: This page is part of the effort of RestructuringTheDocumentation. It is a wikified version of this static page. It is up to date and has been edited. It still NeedsIntertwingling from the (not yet written) pages for QuickSearch, ArtistSearch, ReleaseSearch, and TrackSearch. It now NeedsUpdating too.

The "Advanced Search" form on the Search page is actually the same form the MusicBrainzTagger uses; it allows you to execute a combined search for artist, release and track all in one go.

How to use Advanced Search

If you are searching for an artist, enter as much of the artist name as you can.

If you are searching for an release or track, enter as much of the release and/or track title(s) as you can. The artist name must be the name (or one of the aliases) of the artist in question, so be sure to use the correct name. If you aren't sure, search for the artist name first. Release and track advanced searches look only at one artist's works in any search.

When using the Advanced Search form, it might not be enough to enter one or two key words - for best results, enter the whole name of the artist, and release and/or track.

Example

If you search for the release "Boys" by "Tori Amos" (leaving the track name blank), then what's actually found is Toys, and NOT Boys for Pele. What's happened here is that "Toys" is quite similar to "Boys" - only one letter is different - but "Boys for Pele" is quite different - there are two extra words! Since there is a similarity threshold below which results are not shown, you end up finding one release but not the other.

Differences from QuickSearch

The individual searches on the SideBar use an exact keyword search (e.g. searching for "castle" will never find "castles"); they show all results (within the limits you specify) that contain all of the specified keywords. On the other hand, the Advanced Search (Tagger) form uses a more flexible search based on the spelling of the words, not the whole words - so for example "hate" would now also match "hates", "hat" and "have" (with varying degrees of similarity). At the same time, the advanced search also takes into account the whole name of the track (release, etc) when judging how similar they are.

One other possible difference may be that quick searches (and perhaps artist selection for advanced search with release or track) take ArtistAliases into consideration, but advanced search on artists may only look at the ArtistName.

How It Works

If you do an Advanced Search for an artist, it takes all the ArtistNames, applies the similarity metric, and displays all results within some threshold, sorted by similarity.

If you do an Advanced Search with non-blank album or track titles, it selects (possibly only one) "matching artist(s)" using something like the QuickSearch would have returned, takes all the ReleaseTitles or TrackTitles for the matching artist(s), applies the similarity metric and displays all results within some threshold, sorted by similarity. The first qualification of artist is necessary because otherwise the complete list of all release or track titles would be impractically large for similarity comparison (and/or there is no single sort index?).

If you try to do an advanced release or track search without specifying an artist, you will actually get an error page; similarly if there are no "matching artists" (again, based on exact word matching, like quick search).

Example

If you do an ArtistSearch for "Stills", you get a list of artists that includes "The Stills" (plus "Stephen Stills" and a bunch of others). If you use advanced search on just the artist name, I get the same list of artists, but sorted by relevance (with "The Stills" at the top).

An ReleaseSearch for "Logic Will Break Your Heart" gets the correct result, but if you do an advanced search with artist="Stills", release="Logic Will Break Your Heart", you get no results. This is because that release is by "The Stills" and the alias "Stills" is not associated with them.

Other Notes

There are some useful SearchTools available, such as SearchToolsBookmarklets and FirefoxSearchPlugins

In the future the AdvancedSearch may be superseded by a LuceneSearch that RobertKaye is currently implementing in the PicardTagger.