AllMusic Search Beta

At AllMusic we’re constantly working behind the scenes to improve how the site works, and we’ve recently been looking at our search methodology, realizing it needs some improvement.

The current search on AllMusic has been focused on trying to bubble up popular items and taking some guesses at what a user *might* be looking for. Our new search relies more on providing the user with more exact matches for the words they’ve typed in.

An example searching for the term "Love":

You can try for yourself at https://www.allmusic.com/searchtest

Notes:

The new search beta is accessed by typing into the current search box but is only hooked up to pages where you see /searchtest/ in the URL or see this banner on the page:



You can do multi-term searches (album and artist or song title and artist) like Metallica Black Album or Baby One More Time Bowling For Soup.

You can enter in many common aliases like Slowhand, Lady Day or NIN to find artists known by a nickname.

You can find albums using their common aliases like Zoso for Led Zeppelin IV.

We still hope to allow for Boolean search operators to get even more precise in the future. This is just step 1.

We would love to hear your feedback on how our new beta search works for you, and if there are additional things you’d like to see coming back from search results.

Please comment below or feel free to provide feedback via this handy-dandy form, and it would be helpful to us if we could know the following:

• The search term you entered (What did you type in?)
• The expected result (What were you looking for?)
• The actual result (What did you get back?)
• Whether you are referencing our "Autocomplete" search (the dropdown below the search box) or our full search results page (after hitting enter)
• The URL of the search result (if applicable)
• Any other feedback on search you may have

Thanks for helping us improve the AllMusic we all know and love.

Feedback Welcome!