IMDb Advanced Search Redesign Beta

I take a sneak peek of the upcoming new advanced title search and, for my shock, there is no more the "feature film" category, which was replaced by "movie", and now if I want to search for narrative feature films the results will also display documentaries, concert movies, stand-up comedy, etc. This is terrible. EVERY attempt to "improve" IMDb is for worse. It´s really impressive. Please, at least keep the FEATURE FILM option, where the results will show only feature narrative movies. And create a special category for documentaries etc. Thanks. And please try to keep in this site at least a shadow of what it was some ten years ago. Note: This comment was created from a merged conversation originally titled New Advanced Search: a terrible "improvement".

I didn't find a direct link to this page on the Help for the new ATS: https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/discover-watch/using-the-advanced-search-feature/GLUEUYWPQNPTEVPU?ref_=advsearch_help_opt_next# Specific comment: I filled in a year only on Release dates (upper), and nothing about release date was added to the url. When I filled in a month, day and year, it did what I intended. On the "old" search, year alone was sufficient. And the way this interface behaved, it looked like year was going to suffice here too. Overall I like what I see, especially the ability to change my search without going back to the search page. Probably won't be thrilled with the 50 item limit, and link to the next 50. I am a frequent user of the parameter &count=250. Good news: appending that to the url seems to work! Nicer if it were a clicked option. I don't see the ability to enter a series title so that I can get sort/select episodes from a specific series. I can still append &series=tt... to the url, but it would be so much nicer to have a search box (ala Cast). I see that companies are still a select few. Would be nice to have a search box (ala Cast) instead of appending &companies=co..., which still works. Thanks. Edited to add: Wish there was an occupation parameter in Name search. You have it as part of filmosearch, why not here?

Here we go again 😐 Filtering titles by year is now extremely complicated (more unnecessary clicking), among other things...

Mine looks like this (Croatian language): I can't filter that way, unfortunately. I guess that icon looks different in different languages, for some it's easy and for others harder to set the date. It should be like before, simple for everyone. Alternative to this is to type "1987 feature movies imdb" on Google, but I'm not sure if it will work when the new layout is implemented. I mostly visit IMDb from my mobile phone.

First comment: I am not sure if this is a bug or I may be miss understanding the the purpose of this function, but the very last option, under the section “Your Lists” is not working as I expected it to. Ideally, most search functions include the ability to EXCLUDE as well as INCLUDE parameters. IMDB doesn’t have that availability, so I created a list titled “filter daytime” and add shows to that list that I don’t care about at all, such as daytime talk shows. When I select this list in the “exclude” field, I assumed that the search results would omit anything that is on the list., but when I tested it out, it did not work. I was still seeing the individual tv episodes for a show on that list, in the search results.

And this bar with the all the Xs. Very pleasing to the eye, isn't it?

I know this complaint will fall on deaf ears, but I just wanted to say that I absolutely hate the new "advanced search" feature that I previewed today. The page is crowded with distracting features and the UI is unintuitive and harder to work with. Presumably this feature is being done to make the desktop site more like the mobile app, which has been the M.O. for every site change the past few years. I don't want the desktop site to function like the mobile app! Those are two different things and they should function differently. Like I said, I know this isn't going to change anything, but I do think it would be nice if you guys would give us the option to use the current version if we'd prefer it. There's no need to fix what isn't broken. Note: This comment was created from a merged conversation originally titled New Advanced Search

I'm not sure about this new look yet... However, there is one point I would like to address. When clicking on a company name with the new advanced search activated, the results page does not display the company name. Instead the specific ID of the company is shown (e.g. co0007143 instead of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)). Please change that so the name (including country code) is shown. Also, why does the advanced search page lets you select only some large US production companies? Why not have a search field like with actors?

I opt in for the advanced search beta test. I normally use the duck duck go mobile browser on an amazon andriod device. I feel good out this reworking or update for the most part and prefer the update for the most part. I don't see any glaring issses, the few dropped features seem not that important. I think getting accustomed to the new layout and how to access the same info now is the biggest thing, which is true of any major change. The minor downsides for me seem to being able to view more titles at once on the old version, which is traded off for better readability and a cleaner presentation on the new version. It seems almost all the details and features were kept, but how some of them are accessed has changed, which is fine once I get accustomed to it. It seems some information is now layered and may require a extra step or clicking an icon to access it, which is fine (Metascore, actors, etc.). Plus, some some search parameters were retitled or renamed to be clearer or to be accurate to the three consolidated title, name and collaboration searches. I like the addition of a third view mode option in a title search. The few dropped search criteria like film location were likely little used and won't be missed. I found the greyscale recommended parameters settings to be initially confusing. But, once I realized if they were not changed, the search would ignore them, I had less an issue with them, as they were not default settings. I think if the space in the box were left blank it would be better and less confusing.

The main problem, for me is: I'm a heavy desktop user. And these new "improvements" simply don't work well on desktop. They are designed for smartphones. And the two platforms work in completely different ways. The old version of the advanced title search work perfectly on desktop. And the new version is absolutely flawed, difficult, unintuitive, ugly, and requires a lot more from the user. Please don't go ahead with this, or at least leave us the choice of keeping the old version. By the way, in my Google Chrome every search that I made on the new ATS generates FOUR new itens in the Historic list. I don't know whose fault it is, but it is annoying.

To make this new ATS less difficult I tried to use my Google Chrome historic list, when I want to generate lists that I had generated already. But is no use, because every time I have to exclude shorts and documentaries again. People usually look for narrative films. Why now we have to EXCLUDE documentaries? It were a lot more easier to INCLUDE documentaries, if that was the user was looking for. It is the same case with the necessity to fullfil a complete release date, instead of only the year, like the VAST MAJORITY of users certainly prefer. This new version of ATS benefits only a minority of the users, who is searching for very specific things. It looks like you don't have thinking people working on these "improvements".

I see that the search results URLs arrived at by queries unique to the new search form cannot be properly viewed by those who are not opted in the IMDb Advanced Search β at the time of viewing such URLs, e.g. having the Soundtracks search parameter. I should figure that this wouldn't be a problem once the project goes fully live, but yet I'm not so sure this could be considered ideal behavior even for the time being. We also aren't really provided the option to back opt in after having opted out. I kind of anticipated this, so I only test the thing and things like it in incognito tabs of the Web browser.

"Search country of origin only" isn't very clear if no definition of "country of origin" is available. "Primary country" may be better if the meaning is that only the first listed country for a title is considered. "Primary" is also the description used in the 'X' boxes in the results.

Wouldn't it be good to clarify that for example selecting multiple genres only shows titles with all those genres (AND operator)? Title types use OR while genres use AND, but they look exactly the same on the page.

Under "Your Lists", "include" really means "only include" or "restrict to". It is contradictory to use "include" that way when under "Adult titles/names" immediately above it is used in the usual sense, that those entries are part of the results.