Not what you're looking for?

Renewing my question from Jan. 12... How come the "%" search only returns bands/artists with parentheticals? For instance, "yo%" returns Youth Brigade (US 1) and Youth Brigade (US 2), but not Yo La Tengo.

The reason "yo%" is pulling up Youth Brigade (US 1/2) but not Yo La Tengo has to do with the search order the system follows. Every search preformed is a load on the server (albeit small) and for that reason limiting the number of searches performed is desirable. Since it stands to reason that if an exact search is found on the first pass, say you search on "Yo La Tengo", there is no reason to do wild card searches afterwards on "%Yo La Tengo%" since you've already found what you need. You do not want to begin with wild card searches because if someone searches on "Beatles" you want to return that exact match rather than that along with a hypothetical band call "Too Many Beatles".

However, as part of the first 'exact' pattern matching search I have to include a pattern match on " (%)" because I want to return exact pattern matches for the original search string that might have a disambigiuation substring that we artificially added: "Beatles (US)" vs "Beatles (UK)". So then the first band search performed on the keywords "Beatles" looks something like:

band = "Beatles" or band like "Beatles (%)"

Now, by searching on "yo%" the first search performed is:

band = "yo%" or band like "yo% (%)"

This will immediately find "Youth Brigade (US 1/2)" and search no further, hence not finding "Yo La Tengo".


Kevin

The obvious solution to that seems to be to detect any search query using a "%" already and immediately fall into the inexact-match codepath, since that's what the user is requesting anyway.

I think that's how the coding used to work. I distinctly remember being able to type in two letters followed by a "%" and get more than just the bands/artists with parentheticals. (This type of searching comes in handy when looking for errors.)

I've opened the searching up in accordance with PK's suggestion of dropping directly to an inexact search when searching with the "%" character. I've only opened up band and album title searches because the results can get unweildly (at least in my opinion). If you guys want it to include everything else: artist names, aliases, etc. let me know and I'll put that stuff in there too.


Kevin