"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 