I've visited your site many times . . . but your Search feature is terrible. A search of Schnittke Gennady Symphony No. 5 should not yield 1000+ results! (There should, at most, be a handful: recordings of Schnittke's 5th symphony conducted by Gennady Rozhdhestvensky.) I see no way to pare the results down. You should also not only have Artist as a field in Advance Search, but also Composer. SIGH.
Well, actually, what you're not saying about your hypothetical, test search of "Schnittke Gennady Symphony No. FOUR" is that, as can be clearly seen in the screen shot you provided, it, like my own search, also yielded 1000+ results. And, although one Gennady Rozhdestvensky recording of THAT symphony (No. 4) came up first in the results, one can't assume that it's his ONLY recording of it. Or is that what you're saying? That a valid, relevant result, if any exists, will always come up first (no matter how many hundreds of other, irrelevant other results are listed beneath it)? If so, then I'll take you at your word; but I still question the value and usefulness of also seeing 1000+ other results that are clearly irrelevant (Mahler; Schumann; etc. etc. etc.) (Or, as I did, seeing NO Schnittke result at the top of my results, and nothing BUT 1000+ irrelevant other results.) Unless and until a user learns that it's so well designed that if any relevant result does exist, it'll definitely show first (as I learned just now, but only because I've complained), they can't assume that what they sought DOESN'T exist (if not appearing first on the list) and isn't a needle SOMEWHERE in that 1000+ haystack.
Be all of that as it may, I still maintain that Composer should be one of the fields in Advanced search.
Thanks.
Thanks for responding.
Our search functions like a lot of other searches. It takes each of the words in the string you've entered and matches them against the results of our database trying to find the closest matches, and then presenting them in the order that matches best.
The top result *should* be the one that most closely matches the words you looked for, and then ranked by a number of factors (artist popularity, the amount of information available for that album, etc). Usually we find that if we have the album, it comes up first, and then items that match some of the terms follow behind.
Since we have hundreds of thousands of records in our database with the words "Symphony" in it, not to mention hundreds of records of the words "Schnittke" and "Gennady" (and probably a million records with the number "5" in it), we present each of those options in descending order of value.
It is similar to how Google does it. If you look for something that does not exist... say "Schnittke Gennady Concerto No. 99" (there is no such thing), Google still tries to find the closest match to what you've asked for. In this instance it finds over 96,000 entries, none of which are the exact thing you've asked for (since that does not exist in their database).
https://www.google.com/search?q=Schnittke+Gennady+Concerto+No.+99
The reason our search does not find that album is that we don't seem to have that album in our database.
If you search for Schnittke Gennady Symphony No. 4 the search finds the album right away.
https://www.allmusic.com/search/all/Schnittke%20Gennady%20Symphony%20No.%204
