Finding shows is difficult

[tonymy01]

Ok, a simple task, find the new show "V".   I gave it a shot a day or two ago, couldn't find it, expected it probably hasn't started yet.   Then see it is definitely starting Sunday according to "tvtonight" so must be in the ICE schedule.   Go to the guide, go to search, type "V" and of course 'Whoa! You searched for something that had a lot of matches, so we've only shown the first 200 results below. ' is the result.  Go to Windows Media Centre, go to guide, go to search, type V, and bingo, perfect match, see the show is on 9 and 90 next Sunday.
ICE, please make your searching for shows a bit simpler/smarter than what it is.    This isn't the first time I have tried to find a show and give up looking either.     Another "got-ya" from the search is when you are in "My Upcoming Shows" and do the search, it doesn't search the guide, it actually searches your upcoming shows (which is not really any point given they are all listed in front of you and you can do a browser page search for the text instead).

Ok, lets go to advanced search.   Ok, choose title, and look, it has exact phrase, perfect.   Type V, and hit search, and what do you know, 200 shows with the letter "v" in their titled, this doesn't appear to be exact phrase matching to me?  Ok, I guess my "v" is exactly matched in lots of show titles, and maybe I might want to search for shows like this in most other cases, but it should not be this hard to find a show that I know exists in your guide (don't suggest to surf your guide looking for it either, the guide layout is terrible for finding anything).

Regards

[Russell at IceTV]

It's an excellent point -- there's no way to do an exact name search. And you're right, the advanced search gives you the option of doing a phrase search such as "the simpsons", but it doesn't really help in the case of searching for "v" because it still matches any name that contains the letter v.

With that in mind, I just now added the ability to do exact name searches with a plus sign (+).  Hopefully that will solve the problem.

As an example, consider the search series:today, which matches several shows that contain the word "today" in the series name ("Today", "Today Tonight", "NBC Today", etc.). If you add a plus sign to the beginning, such as +series:today, it will now match just the single show "Today".

And for your particular case, you can now search for +series:v and find just the show "V". (At the moment you can even search for just +v, but you might get other shows with episodes named "V" also if there are any in the future.)

The Advanced Search page has also been updated, to allow you to search by "All words", "Phrase", or "Exact" on the title, series and episode. When you select "Exact" it adds a plus sign in front of the keywords.

And just for completeness, I also added the ability to do "negative exact match" searches, for the rare case where you want to exclude something with an exact match on the series or episode name. This is done by using both the minus sign and plus sign together (-+). For example, searching for +series:v  -+episode:one finds all shows with the series name "V" except the episode "One" (if there was such an episode). And if you have trouble remembering whether it's minus-plus (-+) or plus-minus (+-), don't worry, because they both work.  ;)

Give it a try and see what you think. At the moment it works on the main Interactive site, as well as the mobile site and the iPhone app, but it hasn't been added to the widgets yet. More info about searching is available on the Advanced Searching help page.

Thanks for the suggestion!
Russell

[tonymy01]

Wow, that was a quick response and resolution to a problem that has been bugging me for a while! Thanks ICE/Russell.

[cam]

Cheers Tony.  I didn't realise that V was coming, and had wanted to catch the show.