topic Re: accurate playlist search in Content Questions

accurate playlist search

funnyfriendly — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 02:10:21 GMT

Plan

Free

Country

U.S

Device

IPhone/PC

My Question or Issue

this is a problem i’ve been having for a while. spotify’s playlist search is not entirely accurate. if i search a certain word/phrase it won’t show me every playlist with that word/phrase, and the playlists it gives you changes depending on the date/account. is there anyway to get a current list of all public playlists with a specific word/phrase in them?

Re: accurate playlist search

Eni — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 20:11:51 GMT

Hey there @funnyfriendly,

Thanks for getting in touch about this and welcome to the Community!

Just to confirm, are you referring to the general search function where you can look up any content from the whole Spotify catalogue? If so, keep in mind that Spotify has a huge amount of playlists and new ones are added every day, also many of them have similar names so the app tries to show the most popular ones first. Those can change over time depending on its followers and listeners.

If you're searching for a specific playlist and you know its creator, you can ask them to share the playlist's link with you by following these steps.

Hope this clears things up. If you need a hand with anything else, the Community is here for you.

Re: accurate playlist search

jojotodos — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 07:10:40 GMT

I'm experiencing this kind of inconsistent behavior with playlist searches since I started to use spotify a couple of years ago BUT I'm talking about searching in my personal account. It really is a very uncomfortable inconsistency, esepecially when on mobile. I collect a lot of music and have a lot of playlists, not always can I remember what characters the playlists start with. It seems like the search is only accurate if I know the definite start of the playlist names.

This would be ok in my opinion, if you designed it that way, and it would be just the way it is all the time. But that is not the case. Sometimes entering a word from in the middle of a playlist name finds what I'm looking for anyway. That is inconsistent, misleading and frankly in my honest opinion: Bad user inteface design. This might sound harsh to you but I stumble over this so often that I can't resist to give you an honest feedback and ask for a fix.

One example:

- I search for a list that I know it contains the word "Hip"
- I don't find any playlist
- If I happen to know (or can guess) the beginning of the literal playlist name and enter that exactly the list is found:
- Fore example I put in the word "My" because the playlist is actually called "My Hip Hop List".

But:
- This behaviour is not consistent, on some days I would find it with only entering the word "Hip"

I can only suppose that the "auto-magic-favorite-whatever" mechanism you describe above also applies to my personal playlists, which I find super-odd and not helpful at all.

My concrete feature suggestion (or bug fix in my option rather): If I'm "in my personal playlists view", a simple full-text search is what a user would expect. Any "only show recently touched stuff"-magic is something that should be reserved to what you describe above: A huge amount of playlists all over spotify. _If_ a user might have more than "you name the high number" of playlists, you could still fall back to the "misleading but performance-saving" auto-magic-search you just described above.

Please get back to me with any questions or if you require more information, debug logs or anything that can help to debug the issue.

Hope that helps,
Jojo