Relevance of Spotify search results - what do you think?

[liberatorcnx]

Description

The Spotify search results shown in OTS usually contain many items that are not really relevant to the search term. I decided to try adding filters to the results to display only results that were truly relevant. Of course people will have different views on what is relevant but currently I have applied the following filters, all of which are case insensitive and include allowing 'The' to precede the term, so searching for 'eagles' will include 'the eagles' etc.:

Tracks: Keep only tracks where either title or artist contains the search term (with or without "the ")

Albums: Keep only Albums where either artist name or album name matches search term (with / without 'the')

Playlists: Keep only Playlists where playlist name contains search term (with / without 'the')

Using these filters results in more relevant items and removes a lot of unrelated items.

What do people think about the filters? Are they too severe? Should they be changed?

Once I have a consensus I would be happy to submit a PR (Which branch should I submit to?).

[moddroid94]

Hi @liberatorcnx
That would be a nice improvement!
The filter logic seems good but it may be useful to add a field in the setting to allow adding more than one article and possibly in different languages too, and maybe a global flag to remove filtering at all if gives problems with some language or quirky names.

having it working with other platforms would be cool to, but idk if search is handled by the service module or by the app main code and it's reused for all the services.

You can marge with api-feature for now so we have CI ready, i should merge everything to main sometime in the future but i'm not having much time rn.

cheers :)

[liberatorcnx]

@moddroid94

I have spent some time looking at the UI - I never looked at it in detail before. Now I have added select boxes to the (expanded) search panel to switch filtering on or off for Titles, Artists, Albums and Playlists. I have set the default to 'false' but I wonder if it should be set to 'true'? - I ALWAYS have the filters on to get rid of the dross.

I also now realize that changes made to 'Search for:' (and now 'Enable Search filters') are not persistent. You have to switch to 'Settings' and save if you want to keep the changes next time you run OTS. Should there be a warning about this?

A more fundamental problem I have is with pushing to api-feature because I have been working with 1.2.0 beta (I solved the Search Failing issue some time ago with a much simpler fix). Now the api-feature branch has V 1.2.1 with a different fix for 'Search failing' so I would need to re-work my changes with that version. I have also made some other changes including to the Windows build script and I have also disabled API calls 5 and 6 because the endpoints are no longer available and it is wastes bandwidth and just adds dross to the log file.

I have no knowledge about other platforms and I never looked at languages - if there is a language library used then I guess we could add a translation or we could add a setting for alternative articles (it would need to become an array I guess) and it could be read from config but I question the real value of that.

My modded version is now at https://github.com/liberatorcnx/onthespot/tree/v1.2.0beta-search_update - there are a lot of remarked lines (mainly for logging).

[moddroid94]

@liberatorcnx
Hmmm that's interesting, i don't mind overriding the api branch if your implementation is better and more complete.
if you can tell me what's the last commit you used to fork i should be able to make a branch from that commit so you can merge on that without having to go crazy with merge conflicts.

is the fork on your profile the truth source? if so i just have to fork from tag 1.2.0 basically

[liberatorcnx]

@moddroid94

I cloned a fresh copy of V1.2.0beta and updated that with my changes based on that true source. You will find it at v1.2.0beta-search_update

[liberatorcnx]

@moddroid94

I should add that I know nothing about Episodes, Podcasts or Audiobooks. Maybe similar filters would be relevant? I would be happy to add filters for those too if someone could provide enough information about what to filter by. Alternatively, someone else could easily pick this up and add the filters.

The filters for music files make a huge difference to the results and make the search much more meaningful. Spotify litter their results with stuff unrelated to the search term - A search for Artist 'beatles' (or 'the beatles') returns > 50 results with no filters. With filters applied it only returns 1 result (the correct one!).

[moddroid94]

definitely the filter will be helpful, about audiobook and podcasts we still don't fully support them so i won't bother right now.

i've made a branch from master so you can push into that, there's only a workflow commit ahead but i have to change it anyway.
https://github.com/justin025/onthespot/tree/search-filter-fix

Thanks for the help! :)

[liberatorcnx]

@moddroid94
I have added a Pull Request to the new branch (I can't push to it as I'm not authorised!).
I'm not sure why there are so many changes shown? Did you use the true v1.2.0beta ?

[liberatorcnx]

@moddroid94
I have added another PR 5 days ago (#305) - any chance you could either merge or comment on it? Since adding it I have pushed another 3 fixes which are now there.