The Movie Database Support
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Search Movies and TV in one query
posted by roland684STAFFMOD on June 3, 2014 at 8:54 AM
Is it possible to search in movies and TV in one query? Many things like documentaries could be either. Do I need to do 2 request and combine and sort the results myself, or is there a more efficient way? I've notices there is a way to combine queries within tv ans movies, but haven't seen a search across.
The search on the themoviedb.org site shows movies by default, but also shows how many results there are in tv, people, collections, companies, keywords and lists. To reproduce this, would I need to do 7 separate requests?
Reply by Travis Bell
on June 3, 2014 at 9:53 AM
Hi roland684,
No, it is not possible at this time. In your example, yes you would have to make 7 requests. I have thought about this before and although I don't have any immediate plans to implement this, the ticket for it is here.
Reply by roland684
on June 5, 2014 at 12:19 PM
I don't want multiple lists, but just one list. So I'll combine multiple queries. How can I determine which of the results is the most relevant?
Is the popularity rating global or is it relative for each search? thus can I merge the results and sort on popularity?
Is there anything to determine how relevant the result is to the query? When querying for "galaxy" I would find a movie called "galaxy" more relevant than a more popular TV show with "galaxy" as part of the title. It seems the results are ordered that way within each query. what is this sort based upon?
Reply by Travis Bell
on June 5, 2014 at 12:44 PM
We use Solr for search and there are 3 weighted fields, original title, translated title and then alternative title. Each is weighted less than the former but exact matches are always weighted the most. Meaning, an exact original title will weigh in higher than an exact alternative title.
We then boost the query by popularity but it's just that, a boost. Solr is still going to order items that match the best in order of its internally computed score. This is how we get relevant results when using the ngram
search_type. You can see this in action really well. If you have an iPhone, you can see what this looks like with the app TodoMovies. They are using the ngram search.Reply by Travis Bell
on June 14, 2014 at 10:50 AM
This has been pushed live by the way. You can check the docs for details: /3/search/multi
Reply by roland684
on June 16, 2014 at 5:51 AM
Great, Thanks. (mumbling something about removing the multiple-request routine from my code...)