R

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Monday, October 3rd, 2022 4:36 AM

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I used to be able to search IMDb by Character Names..

Why did IMDb do away with the “Character Name” search function? (This dates me – it probably disappeared from your website ten years ago.) Say, for instance, you wanted to find everyone on IMDb who played the character named “Batman” – it was an available search function and it would pull up all the characters listed by that name. Or another example, my own name is Richard Feinberg. I could search IMDb’s listings to find all the characters in TV or movies named Feinberg (not just the actors, an option which is still available, but the CHARACTER names. I might discover an obscure character in an old TV drama with my exact name, or the name of my brother, sister, or other relatives (and maybe even be able to seek out that show or movie). It was really cool! It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to have that search algorithm made available again. So, if you know, can you tell me if it can be brought back?

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Search: Add character search back

Champion

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2 years ago

Richard: See the discussion at https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/data-issues-policy-discussions/updates-to-characters/5f4a7b258815453dbacbd7f4 where it is explained that they were getting rid of the character name search function (in 2017).

While there were implications at the time that such a function might be brought back later, my understanding was that it would require a lot of work before that could be done. Quoting Col Needham in that thread:

The correct way to do this is with a proper data model tied to the underlying credit database, backed with a full search; available across all IMDb interfaces. Once this is built, you will be able to find all instances of a character name across titles without requiring another contributor to have done essentially duplicate work to manually add each character credit to a separate character page. 

And as far as I know, IMDb has not made it a major priority since then to bring the character name search function back.