✨ Would it be possible to implement fuzzy logic/matching in TMDb's Discover/Search functionality?

[OfficerKD637]

Skin section

Other

Feature description

Hey Jurial!

Hope you're doing well! (Loving the latest version so far!!)

Firstly, I know this is well beyond the scope of the skin engine so maybe you'd have cook something up in Python? Or can some sort of approximate string matching be done in the skin code itself? (whatever you feel is more efficient)

I was wondering if there's any way to add a fuzzy logic/matching in the Discover page (the search functionality). I don't know if this needs to be implemented on TMDb Helper's side or in AF.

I am not sure how often people use the Discover hub (me personally 12 out of 10 times) but I think this could be awesome!

Here's an example: If I search for 'Spiderman', I only get the older Raimi movies. I would have to input 'Spider-Man' (the hyphen is important) to get the newer MCU films to show up. There are a lot of other examples as well but this is the simplest one I could think of at the moment.

Let me know what you think!

Why is this feature needed? Please justify and explain.

Convenience and ease of use

Screenshots and Additional Info

No response

Checklist

• I have opened a separate discussion for each feature I am requesting.
• I have searched the discussions and this feature has not been requested.
• I am using the most recent skin version.

[jurialmunkey]

No this is not possible. The results are whatever the TMDb API server returns for the query and parameters. Neither the skin nor the plugin does the "search" - this is done on a TMDb server.

[jurialmunkey]

Discover and search are two different things. Search only queries titles. Discover query is more keyword based and covers things like plot (not sure exactly what it looks at as the query functionality is not documented in the api docs for discover)

Region settings also influence results.

Default sort for discover is popularity but can be sorted other ways.

The skin does not sort the results. They are sorted by the server.

[OfficerKD637]

Oh ok. But do you have any idea why TMDb Search returns significantly more results than Discover? (80 movies vs 15 movies). Do you think querying titles vs keywords is causing this big of a discrepancy?

Is with_text_query what you're using for Discover?

[jurialmunkey]

Yes that's the parameter. This is server side code so I have no idea how it works other than it does some text filtering for the discover results based on the keyword passed. I assume it checks titles and plots and maybe some other fields.

My best guess is that search queries do closer to what you're thinking and so you get more results. I guess also the discover filter is very rudimentary and doesn't go very deep for performance reasons.

These are very much guesses. Only way to know is to see the server code which obviously is not available.

[OfficerKD637]

Gotcha. Thank you very much for explaining this to me!

One last request. I wanted to substitute Discover and try Search for a few days. I see there's already the DefaultSearch=TMDbMovies and DefaultSearch-TMDbShows. Do you know if there's any way to combine the two? Like how there's a Movies & TV Shows mode in Discover.

Thank you so much for all the help!

EDIT: I just came across multi search but want to remove 'people' from the results

Like here's an example of the weird Discover phenomena I was talking about. I have literally typed out the whole name haha! But it still shows me 'No Results' because I didn't input the hyphen between 'Spider' and 'Man'

[OfficerKD637]

UPDATE: I reached out on the TMDb support forum and was informed that the with_text_query is an experimental feature and hence why it's undocumented (has several limitations like you guessed)

It's on their to-do list: https://trello.com/c/Bf1T0IUL/25-add-a-title-text-search-to-discover

But no ETA yet. Voting might result in getting it implemented sooner.