need character search

Who is this (actor wise) and what is this from? I cannot for the life of me remember and I've been searching for the past two hours!!!!

Hi, Jovan142002. Welcome to the IMDb Community forum! You posted and inquired about the following image:

The person pictured is David Oakes portraying George, Duke of Clarence.

For what it's worth, I'm in favor.  I think it's nice to be able to see who's played the same character over the years in various movies, and a search by title or author won't necessarily turn them all up-- especially for historical figures.

Why has the character search function not been reinstated?  Also, in the FAQs it still says "If you're looking for a character or company, you can select these in the right hand drop down at the end of the search bar or click "See all results" to navigate to the search results page.”  But there is no drop down menu on the right hand side of the search bar anymore, and “See all results” does not give you character names.  I just looked up “Fanny Brice” and neither “Funny Girl” nor “Funny Lady” showed up in the search, even though Fanny Brice is the main character in both of those movies.

mark_d_arcy_28t5abzk3ieq9
Sat, May 13, 2017
Search: Add character search back

? ?

nic_b, Employee
https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/users/5f4953d5bd25507b171c1cf0

Tue, Nov 14, 2017
Updates to Characters
Today we are modifying the display of Characters across IMDb.
https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/data-issues-policy-discussions/updates-to-characters/5f4a7b258815453dbacbd7f4

.

Character search is a big missing feature. I'm looking for a tv series that dramatized the story of Richard Jewell. When I search for him, I get a lot for the actual Richard Jewell, and for the film about him, but nothing about TV series. Name search is useless for this task. It brings up lots of similar names, all of which are wrong. So I click on Exact name match, and it only brings up real people. All I need is a button on the "Exact name match" page that lets me search for characters. He shouldn't be hard to find. IMDB has all the data it needs to look this up, but there's no way to do it.

Limiting it to characters within the character pages makes it useless if I can't find the show. 

@Col_Needham​ 5 years later (2022) and imdb still haven't "re-added" the character search back! This is absolutely ridiculous. It was a great and highly integral feature for search purposes before the changes so why hasn't imdb been working on it all this time to bring it back? And now instead you're making another nonsensical and awful wholesale page layout re-design in Aug 2022.

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?

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.

Since CHARACTERS are no longer listed as searchable objects, how can we find the episode(s) of a show the characters was in as a guest? He's not listed in the "Full Cast" listing (it seems truncated).

Specifically, I was looking for Batman's appearance in "The Adventures of Superman" and there was no way to do a character search.

Sounds like a job for google.

Maybe some fandom-type site has the info you seek.

(I wish IMDb was better at searching for characters too.)

? ?

nic_b, Employee 

Tue, Nov 14, 2017

Updates to Characters

Today we are modifying the display of Characters across IMDb.

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/data-issues-policy-discussions/updates-to-characters/5f4a7b258815453dbacbd7f4

- - -

What is IMDb ?

IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content, 

designed to help fans explore the world of movies and shows and decide what to watch.

Our searchable database includes millions of movies, TV and entertainment programs and cast and crew members

.

Why can't one anymore search charachters so, that if you for example write 'Sherlock Holmes', it would show you EVERY film, series etc. that include that charachter and who played it and where????

Please see

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/imdbcom/how-can-i-search-for-a-character/5f4a7a478815453dbaa03db1

Thank You!

Bit slow though - shouldn't be long peace of code to bring this back to actual site :)

I really miss this feature.  The search just lists individual results you may have to go to page 14 of the responses to get a character.   e.g. site:imdb.com "zeus"  - you won't get a single response that covers each movie with zeus.   I used to use this for a lot of angels, gods, superheroes, even bond.   I hope they put the feature back in soon.

There used to be a feature where one could find characters (usually ones that appeared n more than one film) along with who played them in which films.

It was VERY handy for playing film related games as well as for serious research.

Wondering why this great feature was eliminated and IF it will ever come back  ! 

I just asked a question about the removal of the Character Search .... it was one of the best features of IMDb (imo) ! and it is sorely missed by many, 

This was an announcement about the removal of those pages:

Updates to Characters

It appears that you "fixed " what was not broken without consulting the people who actually USE the character pages.  Seems a shame to lose a feature that  made the site more useful than any other. 

Dan,

Thank you for sharing the use of * in google search!

I don't know why you would google search for character pages WITHIN an actor's filmography. If you just use the Show All feature on their Name Page, and display all episodes (if you restrict that in your settings), you can find all the instances with a browser search. Not every filmography credit gets a Character page, after all.

For George Reeves, I find 172 instances of Superman on his page, while the google search 

https://www.google.com/search?&q=site:imdb.com/title/*/characters/nm0001660%20superman

finds 68.

Similarly, for this search, where you look for character pages using the actor's name and the character name

https://www.google.com/search?&q=site:imdb.com/title/*/characters/*%20superman%20%22George%20Reeves%22

1. you'll miss a lot because a character page is not present for each occurence,
2. you'll get a lot of extra stuff where google finds one or the other

You get fewer results if you join them with a plus:  superman+"george reeves", but still get junk like this page:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044231/characters/nm0489001

To get around the spotty occurence of character pages on IMDb, I would suggest using the fullcredits page instead.

So search for 

superman site:imdb.com/title/*/fullcredits

But the 3040 results will not really be available to you. Even skipping ahead using the page number links at the bottom of the results page, I get to page 26, still seeing 3040 as the number of results, but on page 27 it's down to 267.

This NOT an anomaly. I recently tried using google to scrape certain information from IMDb, and got miserable results. Even though google said it found 4500+ results, it would only show me <300. And when it asked if I wanted to see more, it would never get beyond the 300 (or less) limit.

Google is built for finding a few things relevant to your search, not for data mining.

If my original post were implemented, we could really use the database as such.

bderoes wrote:

Google is built for finding a few things relevant to your search, not for data mining.

 

If my original post were implemented, we could really use the database as such.

I fully agree.

Thanks, ACT_1. I updated my post accordingly.

(Just noticed my own vote for this has been lost in the conversion from GS to sprinklr.)

I suspect that Dan used Superman as an example, and was not actually seeking all the Superman titles.

I'd be surprised if Fandom didn't already have a Superman listing. I've certainly used them for other character lists. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to request it on IMDb.

I was continuing the use of Superman as an example, though my favorite character example is John Munch who started on Homicide: Life on the Street then appeared on The X-Files then transferred to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and also appeared in The Beat, Arrested Development, and The Wire.

We have no way to track that now, and probably will never have it again.

I think IMDb could provide it easily, if they just put forth the effort.

Results might not be perfect, but a simple query on the Character field would at least get the user started.

That user might then be motivated to curate the data into something like this:

All The TV And Movie Universes That Are Unified By Detective Munch

(found with google of "john munch" site:imdb.com/list)

My character needs have been more detailed. Bugs Bunny comes to mind. (Hence my having used Fandom.)

Bugs Bunny - as voiced by Mel Blanc

Seems like Col_Needham implied a forthcoming replacement feature back when the prior pages were removed. (Link to Nov 2017 post):

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. 

@lady_aleena To be honest, there is a ton of specified Fandom/Wikia projects. 

And, in case of John Munch, character is so known he has his own Wikipedia page.  

The change likely dates back to the removal of the old character pages.

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/data-issues-policy-discussions/updates-to-characters/5f4a7b258815453dbacbd7f4