For the elite home video enthusiast
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Tom:
Since I have been doing a lot of input of new items into my database over the last four months, I have done a lot of disc searching. A number of times I have had difficulty locating the item that I own in the Reference Catalog. Sometimes I have had to go to the Amazon link and get them there.
Most of the time I am perplexed about why I cannot find the item - most of the time I find it by hit or miss - I have a blu-ray but I cannot find it when I limit the search to blu-rays - sometimes even when I select all - but then I find it when I search under DVD. The random nature of this search is strange to me.
This morning for example - I had the blu-ray for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - the film with Gary Oldman that came out in 2011. I typed in the search under blu-ray and got only the 1980 British TV mini-series (which I have and have seen and is very good given its budgetary limitations).
I tried all. Nothing shows up. Finally, I tried just the word Spy - a lot of hits but not this and not the TV mini-series either.
Then I tried my final fail safe maneuver - I used the UPC number. There it was plain as day - in the reference catalog. However, your entry is written this way:
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"
The title on the Blu-ray has no commas in it. Your entry does - still I do not know why it would not pick out the words.
Other times when I have had this problem it has been because a colon appeared in the title in your reference catalog - between words of the entire title. No search of the words will generate the item - sometimes limiting the search to just one word in the title will pull it out in such situations.
These anomalies are interesting to me. Is there a technical reason why this happens.
Regards,
John
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John,
At the moment the DVDR2 does not support natural language search. DVDR2 uses exact wildcard matching search. Therefore "Tinker Tailor" is not the same as "Tinker, Tailor". Natural Language search will offer matches based upon approximations. Amazon and Google use natural language search.
Here are some tips on making the search work for you when an expected title is not showing up:
A good way to search for "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" would be to search for "tinker". This is an uncommon word in a title and will match the title with or without punctuation. The general rule is to search for a single word in a title that is not very common.
A good way to search for a title is to search for the movie rather than the title of the disc. You can then inspect the cover art for all of the disc packages that include the movie or program. This can work if the disc has a different spelling or punctuation than is typical for the movie. This approach is also recommended for box sets and collections.
Another way to search is to search by publisher and then inspect the cover art grid visually. This works better for publishers that issue fewer titles.
There are some reference BD titles that are incorrectly cataloged as DVDs. Sometimes this is due to errors in the sources I use and sometimes it is due to an entry error on my part.
Tom Orlofsky
Last edited by modorlofsky (2013-10-06 21:27:09)
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