Search is Extremely Poor

This is entirely correct.

I get that Roon search is at times idiosyncratic and can be frustrating, but one word search terms are pretty unlikely to get you what you want on any search engine looking at many millions of data points.

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If you type “Money P” you get the Pink Floyd track at the top of the list. I can’t quite see how the term “really, really bad” is applicable.

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From your OP, it appears that you were looking for the Composition “Money” composed by Roger Waters.

It is second in the list of Compositions returned in the Search results. Roon’s search function apparently gives extra weight to an artist name containing a search term, which is why it is not the top result…

As someone who looks after a fairly large search engine as part of my day job I feel Danny’s pain here.

I regularly get questions along the lines of “but Google does X” and I always have to bite my lip from replying “…and Google is a multi billion pound search platform, which can afford to throw ridiculous amounts of resources and data points at the problem”.

Good search is hard, what improves search results for one user often results in another user complaining their results are now out, everything is a balance. You don’t get Google level search accuracy out of any box — OSS, SaaS or otherwise.

Unless I am mistaken Roon use ElasticSearch which is one of the most widely used search engines in the world. It’s roots are in Lucene / Solr which again are/were two of the most widely used search frameworks out there.

The issue isn’t the software, or whether it’s uses a truly open or a slightly restrictive licence, it’s that getting search results that work for everyone is hard and requires constant and ongoing tuning.

Not saying it can’t be better tuned and we’ve already seen progress there, but it’s not the underlying search engine/index software itself that is the problem.

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Great to have that insight, thank you for sharing. It must be very difficult to produce results that come anywhere close to what users have come to expect from google, not an easy professional position to be in!

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This one is pre-release of the current search though it is alluded to. Talks about search operators etc.

That‘s right, best would be to have a Boolean search function to reduce the search results

Why even compare to Google? Yes Google is a completely different story.
But why not compare it to my local library - these places where they have books made of paper - they have Computer and database systems which seem to be from the dawn of time. If I put in the name of the book and the author it tells me which shelf to go to, to get the book. Very easy.
If it were Roon, it would give me a completely different book and different author as a result. I would never know the actual book existed in the library, unless I looked through all the shelves in the library.
That is the problem! Roon can not do, what the simplest databases on this planet can do - but is trying to do something fancy in a bad way.

If I search for “Dickens David Copperfield” I am simply not interested in “Shades of Grey” by E.L. James.

Never have I had this problem before Roon - Squeezebox, Plex you name it - results have never been this bad.

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This rings very true for me. I just want the album/artist/track that I know is in my library to be top of the results. If that happened even half the time I probably wouldn’t visit threads like these.

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One thing I would add about the search function failures, at least no one is trying to blame it on the users network yet!!

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"Dickens David Copperfield” is a pretty unique search term, there’s not much ambiguity there. The opening post to which I was referring, mentioned a search for “Money”.

“Money” is ridiculously ambiguous — unless you’re only searching your local library and you only have one album/artist with Money in the name. Music Brainz returns 750 results for 'Money" and I’m not seeing Pink Floyd on any of the first few pages.

I can’t talk of your experience as you didn’t post any real examples. Not that I can do anything if you had, I don’t work for Roon. But personally I haven’t been noticing issue with queries that unambiguous myself. That’s not to say you and others haven’t or that Roon’s search can’t be improved, it obviously can.

There was a thread where Roon have been collating feedback, maybe post some concrete examples there so that Roon can see if there are general / concrete patterns that indicate where the search is badly falling short. Give Roon something concrete to act on, posting ''search doesn’t work" doesn’t help anyone.

But mainly my reply was in relation to this comment and the fact that Roon is already using a tried and tested search platform and that whether it was OSS or not was somewhat irrelevant.

The underlying search framework isn’t the issue, you still need to index, tokenise and weight queries to your specific domain to get decent results and that isn’t easy to get right across the board for all users and all content sources, it takes time and tuning. Roon also allude to this here.

Roon could also look at how results are visually presented back to users, that can often help users find the result they want even if it isn’t the first result returned — hopefully that is something they are looking at in future.

Also I think you’re giving far too much credit to library systems, I’ve used plenty that are terrible at free text queries. Although I’d agree something was up if I couldn’t find Dickens’ David Copperfied :slight_smile:

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Yep. It doesn’t take that much to define a decent regex+synonym-based search engine, and Roon is failing very badly on that.

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I’m not trying to flame the engineers at Roon, or start any sort of war, but please compare the Search function in Roon to any/every other music service that operates over essentially the same dataset – it just doesn’t work well.

Thanks to @j_a_m_i_e for the insights, but that leads me to believe there is an issue elsewhere (like caching), because – again – other services using same datasets just don’t have these issues.

Using Roon on my mobile at home, the search often times out, and only after canceling the search do the results appear. Even my wife is exasperated by the poor results and performance, and she isn’t tech in the least.

I’m not sure what the issues were that caused Roon to change the search, but it feels way worse to me now …

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Sadly it is the case with Roon, I have posted many unambiguous examples in the Roon Search sucks thread and later inside the Beta group. The guy working on Search acknowledged the problem (which is a biggie) and promised to fix it in the future - but really and truly this is basic and should have been the first thing to fix.

“Trovatore Pavarotti” is as basic as “Dickens David Copperfield” but sadly does not get all results.

Sad but true

I have been very active with screenshots on this - that is why I was on the Beta team - so writing “Give Roon something concrete to act on, posting ''search doesn’t work” doesn’t help anyone." is wrong and you are making a statement without any foundation.
No need to immediately try and find blame in the person posting a problem :wink:

We used to have the “Roon search sucks …” thread to consolidate search issues on, and sometimes Roon would respond on it. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent thread for post 880 problems.

Here.

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This is why filters are essential and should be available to select before or after searching to narrow the results presented. Roons search results are just a mess really, take up too much screen real estate. Use smaller icons like the ones from track layout to show the choices and have a filter bar. Every app had this for a reason, it’s a simple ui choice to aid users to find what they want. The below from Roon is just not vey good when you see it next to all the other apps.

Also why do tracks that don’t have Money in the title show up this is not right. It should not be looking at the artist name when I am in tracks.

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Search should prioritize the results that have been manually chosen by me in the past and then the results that have been played in the past. It’s stupid to keep putting on top of the list that results that I keep ignoring when I search for the same thing. Also, it’s stupid to put on top of the list results that I have never played or songs by the artists that I never play.

I mean… try to be smart about it! Prioritize the music that I like!

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Getting search right helps the whole flow, so it should be at the top of the improvement backlog (imo)

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It is hugely better than it was, and I certainly wouldn’t call it extremely poor; there are just still bizarre exceptions. If you can find Beethoven Symphony 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 how can you not find Beethoven Symphony 1,2 3 or 4?

(Is it that the low numbers - 1, 2, 3, 4 - also apply to movements of other pieces? - there will be lots of tracks of Sonatas, symphonies Comcertos etc, that match with Beethoven and 2, but only the symphony will have tracks that match with Beethoven and 6)

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