Not what you're looking for?

Since the search engine doesn't always return what you're looking for, how about a feature like the "wrong person?" link that shows up on Allmusic's name search. So a first guess could be listed, followed by a link that would lead to all entries containing the search string.

Can you give me an example of an incorrect result? The current searching mechanism looks for an exact search and then for a substring match as it seems you are talking about here. Maybe I don't fully understand what you're looking for so an example would really help. Thanks.


Kevin

OK, say you're looking for an artist who's first name is "Ben" but you're unsure of the last name. If you enter "Ben" in the search, you get every band/artist/album with the substring "Ben" in it. Good deal.

But say you're looking for "Ken". Then you're taken directly to the artist page for Ken Owen, who happened to use the alias "Ken" on one album. There's no way to see all the entries with the substring "Ken" in them. So it would be great if there was a link (like Allmusic has) saying something like, "Not what you're looking for? Click here for more matches."

This would be particularly useful for the error-checking I've been doing lately, which involves entering in common substrings and skimming for typos.

Yep. Sometimes an exact match is NOT, in fact, what you wanted.

%Ben%

Misterpomp's a clever one. It never occurred to me to use "%...%".

The "%" trick doesn't always work though. For instance, "%mac%" only returns two band names (Killing Machine 1 & 2) with no artist names or album names.

(Same deal with "%bri%", only returning Youth Brigade 1 & 2. Must be something about bands with the same name.)

%mac

Nice!

The aliases are return an exact result when in fact you want a general return of data. I'll look into that.

I'm glad to see there are some database wizards out there, messing around with the '%' flag.


Kevin

Alias searches no longer hang on stuff like "Ken" instead it will go ahead and find all like string results.


Kevin

If I do a search on "Moby", I get the band "Moby Grape" and the alias "Moby Hall" (Moby's original stage name). Shouldn't I also get "Moby" the (solo) band and "Moby" the alias?

The band name search was disregarding solo artists for a reason I can't remember so I've made it so that it does pick up solo artists on its searches now (so Moby will come up cleanly now). If something goes arwy elsewhere because of the this however, let me know. Thanks.


Kevin

So that "%" trick used to work like a charm, but now it only seems to return artists or bands that have parentheticals after their names -- (US), (UK), etc. What happened?

It would be nice if the search engine could ignore 'The' in a band name. Currently, if I type 'Ex' I get no results, I have to type 'The Ex'.

I've added a default "The" search to band names if nothing is pulled up on the first try. Searches like "Ex" and "Hot Love Band" will now return the correct "The Ex" and "The Hot Love Band". I haven't though through all the possible implications of this but if anyone runs across some weird effect that this starts having on other searches, let me know.


Kevin