omitted result when searching songs
I searched for "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)", but why do the song results omit Van Halen's version that was composed by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen?
2 replies
Ok Zac, I'm searching for "Much too young to feel this damn old Garth" (without parentheses). None of the song results nor any of the type-ahead results include the original recording composed and recorded by Garth.
Zac
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Yep. In our system we drop everything within parentheses in our search indexing.
According to our search, there is no song called "Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old" by Garth Brooks.
If you search for Much Too Young Garth it comes back.
https://www.allmusic.com/search/all/Much+too+young+Garth
Or if you type in the words Much Too Young into the search box, the Garth Brooks song is available in the type-ahead.
It's one of those situations where we're a little hampered by the data in the database. Most song titles with parentheses have non-title info in within the parentheses, therefore "(from Star Wars)" or "[Live at Birdland]" muck up the search and bring back nothing for the search.
A smaller percentage of songs contain actual song title information within parentheses so we opted to only index search on things outside of parentheses and brackets. This finds most songs really well, but penalizes the songs in the situation you're discussing.
When we index songs for search we drop off anything in parentheses or brackets since many of the songs in the database contain extraneous information like "The Glory of Love (Theme from the Karate Kid Part II)" or "Wind Beneath My Wings [Made Popular by Bette Midler]"
This solves the larger problem of better helping users find these songs that have factually incorrect titles, but omits some songs that legitimately have parentheses in the name. Not a perfect solution but a trade-off.
We've tried to solve that a bit by displaying the song titles in our typeahead search as you type in the title:
