Some public playlists aren't searchable

[orphanpog]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States

Device

Macbook Pro

Operating System

OS X El Capitan

My Question or Issue

Myself and another Spotify user have discovered that, though all of our playlists are public, a bunch of them aren't searchable/accessible.  Is there some sort of limit on how many public playlists (and which ones) are actually shown?

[SergioDavid]

Hey @orphanpog, welcome to the Community!

We'll be glad to help you out with this.

The more followers a playlist has, the more likely it is to show up when you search for it. 

Playlists with little or no followers tend to not show up in search. You can still find the playlist if you copy and paste the link to the playlist in your search bar instead.

Hope that helps.

[Soulis]

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@SergioDavid wrote:
[...]

The more followers a playlist has, the more likely it is to show up when you search for it. 

Playlists with little or no followers tend to not show up in search.

[...]

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The quoted part above is untrue (see screenshot below). And it's not determined at the user level with more followers. If you check some of the users shown in the screenshot, some of them have as few as 2 followers total. 

So how do playlists actually become searchable?

Searching by link works fine in the Spotify app, but not in third party apps like Sonos. They rely on the Spotify API, which in turn requires search to be limited by a type, so the link search does not work.

[orphanpog]

I agree—I think playlist searchability is unrelated to both the number of followers a user has and the number of followers a playlist might have. At the time I originally started this thread, it was difficult to search for a user's playlist collection within the mobile app and see all of their playlists. I've since selected 'make secret' for a bunch of my scratch/unimportant playlists in an attempt to make the better ones more visible, but I also think that Spotify has since improved user and user playlist searching functionality because when I search for my username now, all of my public playlists appear fairly quickly. For users who have a lot of playlists (more than 200?) I suspect Spotify employs an algorithm to display a subset of them. I think this is related to a) how they are ordered in your Spotify desktop client (playlists on top appearing first), b) how frequently they are accessed/played, or c) how recently they were created (newer ones appearing first). At least this seemed to be the case in 2018 when I originally posted.