Code for doing a search over multiple indexes now available and sitting, requires an ineterface and probably makes most sense to pass dismax paramters as well

i.e http://search.test.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/all/?query=bjork&dismax=true

As discussed in dev meeting

You can search on test over mutiple indexes, by using endpoint 'all', additionally if the all search is part of the basic search need to add dismax=true.

http://search.test.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/all/?query=incident&dismax=true

If we want to offer it for advanced search as well dont pass the dismax option

http://search.test.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/all/?query=incident&dismax=true

So it would be great if you could add the UI for this so testers can start trying it out, there is probably more work for me to do on this but I need some feedback and I wont get that until there is a UI.

I've had a go at this, but it's difficult to come up with a good way to display this information with a pager and have it still make sense to the user. Currently the offset and limit arguments to /ws/2/all are applied to each of the entities separately.

For the direct search I have submitted a proof of concept to review board which does more or less the same thing as /ws/2/all currently does – but does try to rank and page the entire set of results, instead of per entity type.

Even that approach doesn't really solve the problem which this ticket should solve though. People want to search for things like "beatles mystery tour" and get both the release and the recording of that name. So we need to have some sort of index where the combinations of [full artist credit name] and [entity name] can be found (where entity is one of release_group, release, recording, track). Probably the actual artist names should be included as well, as people may be searching for that instead of the credited name.

UPDATE: ocharles just explained to me that the dismax argument to the search server solves the "beatles mystery tour" use case. That wasn't clear to me from the comments on this ticket and the SEARCH-77 ticket.

My hope was that we could get a basic UI done and available on test so it can be tried out and discussed then we get can work out issues with paging scoring ectera, until we have this first stage it is difficult to visualize and sort out final solution.

As discussed in today's irc meeting, the next step is to send a mail to mb-users what they would like to see here.