topic Re: API - search for tracks is flaky in Spotify for Developers

API - search for tracks is flaky

marcopacurariu — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 11:20:46 GMT

Plan

Free

Country

Romania

Device

Web API

Operating System

Windows

My Question or Issue

https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=track:Chiquitita%20artist:ABBA&type=track

It returns me no data.

But it only works with such a search:
https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=Chiquitita Abba&type=track

According to the documentation: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/search

They say: The artist and year filters can be used while searching albums, artists and tracks. The isrc and track filters can be used while searching tracks.

It is flaky - I remember I had this issue in the past. It sometimes work, but sometimes it returns no data.

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

Selbi — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 13:12:50 GMT

Yup, can confirm that I have the same problem with my own Spotify API project. The search simply returns an empty list if the query contains advanced search tags like "artist:" and "track:"

This 100% used to work only a few days ago, because I didn't touch my code at all recently. It's like Spotify's search API decided to stop playing nice overnight.

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

marcopacurariu — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 15:30:04 GMT

Thanks for confirming it, too.

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

LambertSpot — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:43:55 GMT

Just wanted to drop by and let you know that we are currently looking over the search functionality. Hopefully we will have some good news to share soon.

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

marcopacurariu — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:50:29 GMT

Thank you!

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

tuannamnguyen — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 17:23:14 GMT

this api is also not working for me as well. please look into this since i haven't made any change to my code for a while

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

LambertSpot — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:31:09 GMT

Try to make sure you URL encode the : character (%3A) in the request, otherwise you will not get any search results. That is why https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=track:Chiquitita%20artist:ABBA&type=track does not return any data, while https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=Chiquitita Abba&type=track does.

You can also see in the developer console that the href you get back has done this. You can also see in the example for the query parameter in the documentation, that this is being done: Example: q=remaster%2520track%3ADoxy%2520artist%3AMiles%2520Davis

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

Selbi — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:52:11 GMT

Either I'm misunderstanding something or that isn't the fix. As soon as I remove the "remaster" stuff from that example query, I get no more results:

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

LambertSpot — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 10:38:39 GMT

I replied in another thread on the issue. But basically we were able to reproduce, found that there was an ongoing experiment in an upstream system that was causing this issue, and stopped that experiment. I could see that the behavior went back to normal (if you search with colon-syntax you get tracks results). Are you able to confirm this as well?

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

Selbi — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 10:48:57 GMT

First tests so far are looking good! I used to get some complete nonsense results for some search requests before, but it looks like it has finally stabilized. I'll report back if I encounter more issues, though I got a good feeling this was the issue.

Thank you!

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

marcopacurariu1 — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 13:36:01 GMT

It works again. @LambertSpot, I am using actually a Java API to call and we never had to encode it. Now that you added that fix or whatever, I don't have to encode again and it works.

Re: API - search for tracks is flaky

LambertSpot — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 08:46:57 GMT

Sorry for bringing you on a wild encoding goose-chase. 🙈