Yes, I have lots of Star Trek soundtracks, hence the post that Roon search isn’t that useful on keywords, and prioritising non-library hits over library ones
OK but consider the plight of the Star Trek fan that also likes Rob Halford (not unlikely, I’m a long-term Trekkie and Judas Priest fan) and has all the albums stored locally. For your minimal search string of ‘insurrection’, what would annoy you most coming up as first search hit? Roon can’t win in this scenario with such a minimal search string.
Yeah …
I’m in Season 4 of a rewatch of Next Generation
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The simplest solution I’ve seen from a UI perspective is a version of what Amazon does frankly.
Let’s say you start typing “Wagn” into the search box.
Then predictive search (the drop-down under the search box) populates a few lines at the top indicating what narrower search context you might want, based on the best guess for what contexts.
So the first few lines might be: “Wagn… in composers” “Wagn… in albums” and “Wagn… in compositions”. Each of those would take you fairly far down the search tree.
Then the next lines would give a small handful of best guess as to what the complete word you are looking for would be, so they might be “Wagner” or “Wagon” or “Wanderer” - whatever completions or best guess misspellings are the most likely given the clues you’ve given.
And only then in the drop down would you have the very specific albums or tracks that it’s guessing. The goal is to avoid people ever hitting “return” in the search box as much as possible.
The advantage of that fix is that you don’t have to rearchitect search or the way it works. It’s just that the system gives you more options to get further down the tree with less thought given. (Some of those branches could even go to filter, as in “Wagn… in albums in my library”). People experience this as “search works better” but in reality you haven’t done much to the queries - give just surfaced them in a way that seems more “natural”. I’ve seen it at company after company.
The downside is you are running a lot of expensive searches in parallel, and so performance can be tough. That’s one reason why search teams are big relative to expectations.
16% of $73B in 2021
Amazons estimated percentage of world search advertising revenue.
Pays for a lot of people in your search team.
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When will search be equipped with fuzzy logic?
Appreciate that designing a scoring algorithm to rank hits is a non-trivial task, and difficult / impossible to please all people all of the time. That said, I am puzzled by how Roon’s ranking works. Per the screenshot in a previous post, Roon thinks that a song called “Songs of Insurrection, for piano”, which I have never played and features a composer and performer who I’ve never played either, is more relevant for the drop-down list of matches than an in-library album that also has a match on the keyword. Given Roon knows that I’ve recently played the Star Trek Insurrection score, I’d have thought that would be relevant information for it to use.
Roon doesn’t know what you have personally played. All play metrics are anonymised I believe and used in Valence in some way to determine how the Roon Radio function is steered towards artists and tracks. I don’t think your play history has any impact on how your search works.
A weak point of Roon Search has always been the inability to find an exact match to a search term, even when it is in your library. It does find some bizarre tracks as a match in preference to an exact match, which is quite ridiculous for a search engine.This is improving with every release, as Roon now have a dedicated search developer. He seems well aware of the current limitations, so this can only get better.
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But it does know what I have in my library. I believe many of my frustrations with the search results could be relieved by prioritizing matches in my library over what they deem most relevant globally.
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That would make me very unhappy for many of my searches: I use Roon to expand my horizons beyond what I know, possess or have played in the past. Edit: my focus is on streaming!
So as stated so many times before: it all depends on your expectations. With my set of expectations Roon produces very interesting results, I must vote (totally) against the approach you are suggesting.
And I do believe global trumps individual - or should do every time (on soooo many levels). For this particular situation, my understanding is that you have a solution: limit the search to your library. In all other cases the current approach by Roon seems justified to me.
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That’s incorrect. I said, “prioritize”. That means the results in my library come first while all other results are still displayed, just not at the top of the list.
Another option I would consider is to make the “Library” icon “sticky”.
I click this button countless times a week. If it stayed “clicked”, I could leave it that way until I’m ready to search outside my library.
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As i said before: i totally disagree with what you are trying to force on the community here. I fully understand why your request would not be considered a priority (or considered at all). In a world that is evolving towards streaming from the cloud, effort spent for use cases that prioritize local (re)sources are probably not the optimal use of scarse development resources.
It is not so that you cannot achieve your real goal (find the element you are looking for). Perhaos not in the way you would prefer, but that (as explained above) might even be considered normal.
And with those thoughts i will leave this discussion, that I consider to be not really to the point.
Kr
–jan
In Roon, your Library consists of both local files as well as streaming resources you have added to your favorites on Qobuz or Tidal. I’m not suggesting that local resources should be prioritized over streaming resources.
Hello
Sorry Roon search sucks , I’m losing a lot of albums that Roon can’t find in Tidal and when I use tidal search I have completely different output, I’m thinking not to extend my membership and look for an alternative
Hi - I hope this is the right place to post this. It’s offered in the spirit of trying to improve search for everybody. My example search is “moody”.
The top result is a song by that title on a Dave Brubeck album on Qobuz, that is not in my collection, although I do have a couple of Brubeck albums. None with that tune though.
The top six hits under Artist are not artists in my collection, and seem to me to be pretty obscure. Hit #7 in Artist is the Moody Blues, who I have more than twenty releases of in my local library. I would expect them to be the top hit.
The top six Albums returned are all by the Moody Blues, which I would expect.
The hits under Tracks and Composers aren’t really interesting to me, but from a quick scan I’m not sure I see any value to me.
Hope this helps. Thanks for the work on search.
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Can you please provide examples? What did you search for, and what would you like to see?
I tried searching for “moody”. Here are the results:
I’m pretty much in the same boat as pscreed. I have one Brubeck album in my collection but not that track.
I have 6 Moody Blues albums in my collection, but it’s the 6th result in the list of Artists.
99% of the time I enter “moody” into search, it’s because I’m looking for “The Moody Blues”. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable way to go about finding something in my library.
I would far prefer if the search results prioritized results in my library over what might be “closer” matches to the search term.
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I haven’t read too far back in this thread, so my apologies if I’m missing the point, but you can restrict your search to ‘library only’ by clicking the library icon (top right, to the immediate left of the filter).
And what might you expect if you searched for “blues”? I also own a few Moody Blues albums, and they don’t even show up when searching for “moody”. The only way for Roon to prioritize your local files over streaming services (I have Qobuz, Tidal and NAS) would be to add that option, something I don’t need or want. I =want= Roon to give me everything from all three sources… far better to get too much than too little when it comes to queries. Why not just search for “moody blues”?
BTW, hope you are well. 
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Guys this “defend Roon at all costs” I think is not the purpose of this thread. It’s a behavior on this forum that is a bit off-putting sometimes. We were invited to provide feedback on the search function by the Roon team itself. No one is criticizing the team or the product. We all want it to get better for everybody. We’re trying to help. Feedback is the way software gets better. We’re sharing our own feedback and expectations not looking for a rumble.
Thanks.
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