I’ll try to answer some of your questions. Hope this sheds some light on the issue.
If you have only local files, you’re experiencing only the search functionality that is on your machine. As such, it’s relatively lightweight for a search engine, and it’s part of your roon broker. In the example that you posted, it picks up all the tracks with “change”, or “gonna”, or “come” in the title. It fails however in scoring them in a correct way, especially given the large library.
Indeed search is very basic functionality, but it’s also very complex to get right. We’ve been rewriting this functionality from scratch for a while now, and hopefully, you should see visible improvements very soon.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet or ready search solution that can be taken and used as-is, because each business, product, and customers have different requirements and consider different search results as more relevant. F.e. a search engine that is optimized for an e-shop or in the medical field won’t work so well in music, and vice versa.
Some additional info:
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Different results for different users are due to different libraries, streaming services, and in which country/region that streaming service is being used from. This makes troubleshooting and understanding the engine for users more difficult.
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In general, adding quotation marks won’t help. In most places, they are being ignored. So, even if they do make a difference here and there, it’s rather accidental.
@phantomtides until the new search is on your machine, the only thing I can advise you for now is to try to enter the least amount of words, but as specific as possible, because the more words you enter, the broader the search results. So for this title, all these words are quite common, but maybe “gonna otis reading” could work? Another option is just to search for the artist, and then filter within the discography. I know how cumbersome this is, but other than that the only thing I can say is “please wait”.
@Lonek I can guarantee that there is no malice or hidden business agenda behind it. It’s in roon’s best interest to provide the best possible search results and reduce any possible friction there. Anything else would be counterproductive.