To add insult to injury, that German movie has a poster that I would say should not be returned if I exclude adult searches.

Search results are ordered by exact matches first, then in order of Solr's relevance score but boosted but things like popularity and release date. Searching for titles has nothing to do with languages, or the translations that exist. It's a string to string check meaning whatever you enter as a query will be searched against everything we index. If there's a match we show it.

The fields that are checked are the original title, translated titles and alternative titles. More weight is given to match original then to translated, and lastly, the least weight to alternatives.

With regards to an image, there's no image filtering that takes place (we can't even tag the images). Only movies themselves are filtered and if the movie isn't an adult movie then whatever is set on the image will show.

The movie search fails to find the following titlles (in the first 20 results anyway):

Dune

Devil

Dave

Big

Searches using longer movie titles succeed.

Let's take "Big" as an example. The url used by my app was:

http://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=&query="Big"

The 20 results all had "Big" in the title but they were all longer than just "Big".

Yet a website search using "Big" returns the "Big" movie as the first result.

I find that if I add "&search_type=ngram" to the url, the searches succeed! And yet I've seen posts that ngram search is not used for the web site searches. This seems to be inconsistent. Can this be explained -- or what am I doing wrong?

I'm not sure I understand… if I use the following query:

http://api.themoviedb.org/3/search/movie?api_key=###&query=dune

The first result is Dune.

{
  "page": 1,
  "results": [
    {
      "adult": false,
      "backdrop_path": "/zwyQjr7PAIVvcQoVrI5kXqXqt2t.jpg",
      "id": 841,
      "original_title": "Dune",
      "release_date": "1984-12-14",
      "poster_path": "/wuiUqivUWiUySwhEvtdOqrlrLPn.jpg",
      "popularity": 3.9731428200273,
      "title": "Dune",
      "vote_average": 6.5,
      "vote_count": 108
    },
    {
      "adult": false,
      "backdrop_path": "/a1Igg0OlvBG1BYTqu18yxX6P7K6.jpg",
      "id": 876,
      "original_title": "Frank Herbert's Dune",
      "release_date": "2000-12-03",
      "poster_path": "/xhLPh6po1r1qDnemdCj8pGS2MvG.jpg",
      "popularity": 4.16104858897482,
      "title": "Frank Herbert's Dune",
      "vote_average": 7.9,
      "vote_count": 21
    }
    ...
  ],
  "total_pages": 6,
  "total_results": 116
}

Same for Devil, Dave and Big, so… I'm not sure what you're doing but everything is returning like I expect here...

I guess it was a simple error. I was enclosing the query string in double-quotes in the url. When I removed the double-quotes all seems to work super well, both for short single-word queries and for longer, and partial, titles. (The multi-word query strings are escaped so a space becomes %20, etc.)

Strangely, before, when the multi-word queries were enclosed in double-quotes the searches seemed to work OK, but not for single-word queries.

Hey David,

Wrapping your query in quotes would indeed cause different results. I believe Solr will treat that different but I don't know the exact specifics.

You should indeed be escaping your queries though. The proper way you'll get handling of characters like ampersands, apostrophes, etc… will always be if they're escaped.

Cheers.