Improved search in database

Hi everyone

I bet this has been discussed before, and there probably is a ticket about it, but I keep thinking about it and wanted to discuss it here:

How about an advanced search function? I would love to be able to search directly for “Four Tet Morning Evening” to find directly the right release group, instead of looking for the artist first, and then look through their discography. I would love to be able to just type “electronic estonia” to find artists from Estonia with music tagged as electronic.

Is there already such a cross-entity search and I am somehow not aware of it? If it does exist, it should be more accessible from the front page I reckon… Like a “search all” in the search drop-down menu.

Cheers

You can search for release groups, just hit the dropdown and pick release groups.

However, cross-entity search is a long-time wishlist item.

Oh right, thank you for your answer. I didn’t realise that the release search did consider the artist in the process.

Do you have a reference to a ticket that talks about cross-entity search by any chance?

is the ticket you’re looking for. :slightly_smiling:

Note that the search server part is actually working, but it hasn’t been implemented due to issues with the interface for it. There was some work being done last year during the Google Summer of Code for a “unified search and browse” interface and there’s also work underway to completely replace our search server with a (hopefully!) better behaved one. So the current status of this is not immediately clear from just that ticket (and I’m not sure if that e-mail to the mb-users mailing list ever got sent either).

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The latest is that we think the new SOLR-based search server has implemented this already, but it hasn’t been tested yet. But I’m not sure about the status of the “unified browse and search interface”. Maybe @Bitmap is more up-to-date on that?

About the new browse & search interface: I spent some time cleaning it up recently (has a lot of tiny issues), so hopefully we’ll get it merged in the next few months. Trying to give a realistic estimate, since there’s currently a bunch of schema change tickets I need to get done ASAP first. :cold_sweat:

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