MusicBrainz Search Overhaul

Hello people o/, samj1912 here.

I am extremely glad to announce that we are finally launching our Solr search on the MusicBrainz beta server!

Just a little history before I announce the new features and toys you get to play with:

Solr started as something that could replace our existing search infrastructure. If you have been a MusicBrainz user for a while, you might know that our search has quite an indexing latency and it takes as much as 3 hours for new edits to show up in the search results. In part because updating the search index involved doing an entire re-index of the database. With the high latency and the resources it took, the current search server left much to be desired.

Another area that our current search lacked in, was showing popular results and search ranking. Searching for a famous artist or place returned results that contained a lot of noise, and more often than not, contained results that weren’t relevant to what the user had in mind when they searched for it.

These were the two major problems that motivated us to shift to a better infrastructure for our search needs.

Thus, MB-Solr was born.

It has been in development for quite some time now. The coding for the project started with Mineo back in 2014 and was carried forward by Jeff Weeksio in GSoC 2015. But due to lack of development resources and other, more pressing needs, the project was put on a hold for a while, until Roman started working on it. However, he left MetaBrainz before he could finish this work, so when I joined the MetaBrainz team, the first and foremost task that was assigned to me was getting Solr working and ready for production.

After struggling with multiple moving parts and services, tons of issues with maintaining compatibility with our existing web-service API, rowing up and down multi-threading/processing hell, learning just enough about information retrieval to get our search relevance on point and countless hours sifting through Solr documentation to get our Solr cluster fine-tuned and running fast enough to keep up with our web traffic… we are finally here.

I am pretty sure I would’ve rage-quit dozens of times during this last year if I was doing this all alone.

As such, we have our trusty sysadmin Zas to thank for taking care of all the deployment needs and making sure Solr was well-tested (believe me we toyed with Solr like little kids in a sandbox) and wasn’t going to fail and wake him up 3 AM in the morning with red alerts all over. Mineo, Bitmap and Yvanzo were there, with much-needed code reviews and help with all things Solr and MusicBrainz. Our style leader Reosarevok, and CatQuest helped us test our new search relevance configuration. And of course, we had our BDFL, Rob over-seeing things and whipping them into shape (with chocolate and mismatched socks of course).

Anyway, here’s what you are here for:

New features/improvements

• (Almost) Instantaneous search-index updates – Edit something and immediately see it in the search results. Say goodbye to that note you used to see below the search telling you that you have to wait. Who likes waiting anymore – seriously, it’s 2018.
• Better search results – We wanted to make sure you were getting the right Queen and London as the top result. You can finally link your favorite artist to London, UK as opposed to London, Arkansas. Don’t believe me? Go try it out.
• Less load on our servers – Meaning we can serve more of your requests, faster. Getting tired of waiting for tagging your bajillion songs in Picard? Well, you still gotta wait, but less so, now that we are better equipped to handle your requests.

What has stayed the same

• WS/2 Search API – We know you devs hate doing that extra work to maintain your applications’ compatibility with that one site that changes its API on a whim. Well, we wouldn’t want you to spend those hours following that one int to float change that broke everything ever. As such we have worked hard to make sure that Solr doesn’t change any of our WS/2 search schema.

What’s gone

• WS/1 Search API – We deprecated WS/1 back in 2011. With the new search servers in place, there are only 3 words for those still using it after WS/1 being deprecated 7 years – ‘poof, it’s gone’. The service still works on our main website, but its search functionality will be phased out soon, while the entire service will be discontinued in August 2018 as announced earlier.

Now, you must be thinking there is some catch, some slip. Well so do I, which is why we are releasing this beta for you to test the heck out of our new search over at the MusicBrainz beta site. If you haven’t used it before, worry not – it has all your personalizations and all our cool music metadata from our main site. You should feel at home. (Note: The MusicBrainz beta site works on the live data. Any edits you make on the MusicBrainz beta site will also be reflected on the main site.)

So please! Go check it out!

If you feel you aren’t getting what we promised you or you want more of those shiny new features or that this blog was too long or like a TV commercial, feel free to complain at our Ticket Tracker for Solr. You get your promised features bug-free and our devs get to earn their living. It’s a win-win.

Happy testing!