secret search

[Karanight]

I know I said I didn't want any new features till you've done the fast search but here's something I thought will be useful for the future.

I've noticed the KJ's that work for me will put the wrong info in the search box when searching, for instance when a song is called "This One Is For You" they'll type "this 1 is for you". the only tracks found will be those with "1" somewhere else in the meta data like the album, for example SF109
Obviously if they type "this one is for you" then the tracks titled "this 1 is for you" won't show

Could you make a secret search tag box so that "1' or "one" can go it the tag box and then it won't matter what is searched for because both will be found
Hope this makes sense

[Karanight]

This would also be useful when there's different spellings, like color 'US' and colour 'UK'

[djunod]

Yes, I've run into this when writing the more generic Where's the Karaoke? software. Trying to search through songs that the different KJ's have entered the metadata for. So many misspellings, weird artist names. Plus, more often, the users don't know the correct spellings either. Years ago I did searches with SoundEx, so looked into using that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

It would work somewhat for English.

[dave]

i'm not going to cater to people who willfully use the number 1 in place of "one", nobody should ever expect that to work, and if they do then they should instead go take "Computers 101" at the local community college.

Part of your job as a KJ is to ensure you have "Perfect Metadata". it really should not be up to the software creator to compensate for bad spelling on the part of users. users should use correct spelling.

regarding "locale" differences like "colour" vs. "color", i recommend just don't search for stuff with that kind of variation, eg: you can search for "colo" and it will be found either way.

[DeusExMachina]

As someone who has painstakingly gone through most of a 70,000 track collection song by song fixing metadata, I can second that. That said, the issue with drunk patrons entering bad data, and songs that actually have weird spellings (yes Prince, I mean you) it would be nice to have some A.I. fixing silly user errors. Barring that, Soundex type database searches would also be nice, but would also return false positives that might confuse the same users you are trying to help. The other issue, of course, is that you would have to re-index your whole library.

[dave]

maybe one day when AI is cheap (i'm looking at you Siri) it can be more easily built into kjams, but for 1.0, you'll just have to try to spell it right, or at least just spell the part of the word you know how to spell, at least that works

[DeusExMachina]

Dave:
Have you looked at SoundEX or DoubleMetaphone? Very interesting algorithms, and computationally cheap. Not sure they are really applicable, but maybe.

[dave]

no. currently there is absolutely zero chance of the search engine changing at all before "Fast Search" is done