Clarification on search3

[cquike]

Hi,
I am using Koito (https://koito.io/reference/configuration/) to store my scrobbles from my ampache server (https://ampache.org/).
Koito has an option to ask your subsonic server for information about the album (https://koito.io/reference/configuration/#koito_subsonic_url).
For instance, my Koito server is asking ampache for this request:
https://myserver/rest/search3?u=XXX&t=XXX&s=XXX&f=json&query=Morcheeba+Big+Calm&v=1.13.0&c=koito&albumCount=1
However the ampache server is returning nothing. If instead the query is "Morcheeba" or "Big Calm" then ampache is able to find the album(s).

My question is whether in the opensubsonic specification there should be any constraint on the query format. Should the search proceed word by word against all possible objects (songs, artists, albums). Or should all the words be searched against a single type of object at a time? (Like ampache seems to be doing).

My impression is that this can be a tricky interface for servers to implement. If an extensive query needs to be performed then this can be expensive computationally. On the other hand what Koito is trying to do I guess is to make sure that you get an unambiguous answer, since there might be several albums with the same name.

[Tolriq]

Even with albumCount = 1 you could miss multiple version of the album or get the wrong one.

Should search for the album name with larger albumCount and find in the results the one that matches the artists, track, whatever to ensure it's the proper one.

[cquike]

So basically the type of query that Koito does is not the correct approach, right?
I just checked LMS (https://github.com/epoupon/lms) and it behaves the same way as ampache.

Maybe it would be good to have some clarification on the search3 API page?

[lachlan-00]

The demo.subsonic.org site returns results for each word individually. Is it commonly used behaviour? If it is common we should definitely document that. I've never used the query parameter that way and do like/full string searches on the query string

Putting a plus between the strings i wanted to join works, not sure how subsonic itself works but i can't find other info

[lachlan-00]

wrapping in quotes joins as well, "plastic city"

[deluan]

Navidrome searches per word individually, so "big calm" and "calm big" yield the same result. Also, in case of albums, it search in the artists and albumartists as well. So, "Morcheeba Big Calm" would find the album correctly. I think I copied this behaviour from OG Subsonic.

[epoupon]

Does it also look in the (album?) artist name when looking for albums? (LMS does not)

[lachlan-00]

My understanding is that that it's searching all three types by name/title

It will search

Album name, artist name and song name for all strings individually.

So searching in this way would return artists matching the query but not return albums unless the string matches which I think is your current process.

[lachlan-00]

@cquike I still think we should make the clarification on this. I'd forgotten which areas this conversation was in and lost my place.

From what i can tell the rules should be something like what i'd said above.

• Search the name/title for each object being searched (e.g. search album name when searching for albums, not album artist)
• Match on any word individually
• Group words by + join or wrap in ""
• Grouped words are exact match only
  • e.g. "plast ci" will not match anything but "plastic city" will
• Ungrouped words are like matched on the end of each string
  • e.g. plast ci is the same as searching plastic city

@epoupon @deluan and @Tolriq are there any rules missing here?

Are escaped characters like \" and \+ be treated as the individual character?

[cquike]

I guess what you suggest makes sense.
I still have a question: would a query like the one above (query=Morcheeba+Big+Calm) show first the album Big Calm from Morcheeba? In other words, if there is other album called "Calm Big", for instance, from a different artist, will still the one from Morcheeba appear first one in the list?

[deluan]

I don't think we can enforce how to handle relevance in the spec. It will all depends on the server implementation. Each FTS engine (if used) has different behaviours and configurations.

[lachlan-00]

pull added to bring back discussion #246