The Movie Database Support
Support → Website Support
Searching for a movie with the 'year' at the end doesn't always work
posted by Chris2922STAFFMOD on August 13, 2013 at 12:42 PM
I have used this website for a number of years without a problem, but now I am having trouble searching.
Example - recent release 'Pain & Gain' from 2013.
If I search "Pain & Gain 2013" or "Pain & Gain (2013)" the site returns no results.
If I search "Pain & Gain" the site returns "Pain & Gain (2013)".
This is strange because i always used to search using the year in this way - and now it doesn't work.
Over the years i have named my movies folders using the search results on this site to enable Xbmc to find the art and info. If my library needed to be refreshed Xbmc will no longer be able to find movies it was once able to find no problem.
My question is - has something changed here on themoviedb? Why can the site no longer find movies when i search with the year on the end?
Is there a way around this?
Reply by Travis Bell
on August 13, 2013 at 12:45 PM
The only supported website feature is to append
y:XXXX. Example: Pain & Gain y: 2013:https://www.themoviedb.org/search?query=pain+%26+gain+y%3A2013
We do not support searching for the year with it simply appended to the end anymore. This changed maybe, 3 months ago.
You'll still see some work because there's an alternative title added that probably contains the year. This is just a side effect of the alternative title search and not a supported feature.
Reply by Chris2922
on August 14, 2013 at 2:14 PM
Thanks for the reply, after a bit of trial and error I've found it won't work with a space between the 'y:' and the year. This worked - Pain & Gain y:2013
Sadly I cannot use the colon charcacter in folder names so this is no good for xbmc.
Is there a way to search using the year without using the colon or any other unsupported file and folder name characters?
Reply by Travis Bell
on August 14, 2013 at 2:33 PM
Hi Chris,
For XBMC (and the API) it's completely different. Our search API has two supported params,
?yearand?primary_release_yearthat any developer can use. How/if XBMC uses this I am not sure about, you would have to ask them.The
y:XXXXis a website only feature.