[v2] Search results are capped at 500 (or 489?) instead of 5000

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[v2] Search results are capped at 500 (or 489?) instead of 5000

shahoodshahood Member ✭✭
in Report a bug

Hi @AmosDuveen

Here I have to report two issues:

1) The limit of search results is documented as 5000 (screenshot below) whereas if we give any value in 'limit' field that is more than 500, it returns the following error:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<title>400 Bad Request</title>
<h1>Bad Request</h1>
<p>limit is greater than 500</p>

So, apparently on the backend, the limit is capped at 500 instead of 5000

2) Secondly, the actual results returned are less than those reported in metadata's 'total' field. For example, I searched for 'storye' and 'second-story man' using
https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com/api/v2/search/en-gb?q=storye&prefix=false&limit=500 and
https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com/api/v2/search/en-gb?q=second-story%20man&prefix=false&limit=500 respectively. The results reported by 'total' field were 579 and 640 respectively but actual results returned were 489 in both cases.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Thanks

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Comments

  • AmosDuveenAmosDuveen Member, Administrator, Moderator admin

    Hi @shahood,

    Thanks for feeding back all of these issues, I have passed them onto our developers to investigate.

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  • shahoodshahood Member ✭✭

    Hi @AmosDuveen

    Should we expect a fix any time soon?

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  • shahoodshahood Member ✭✭

    Hi guys,

    Its been almost two months since I reported this issue. The last comment said that it has been forwarded to the dev team to investigate but the results of investigation have not been posted here.
    Would really appreciate if u could at least declare it as a bug and say that someone is going to fix it OR if it ain't a bug, pl let us know how.

    Looking forward to a prompt response!

    Best regards

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  • TaisFukushimaTaisFukushima Member, Administrator, Moderator admin

    Hello @shahood

    Sorry for the delay.
    I've checked it with my colleagues and they informed that this issue was fixed, so it should be working properly now.

    Thank you very much for your comment, and for flagging this up to us.

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  • shahoodshahood Member ✭✭

    Hi @TaisFukushima

    Thanks for the reply.

    I think the issue is still there, just in another shape.

    Here is a comparison of the number of search results that we get in both versions:

    Search term = ma (All words starting with ma)
    v1 search results = 5,518
    v1 URL = https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com:443/api/v1/search/en?q=ma&prefix=true&regions=gb
    v2 search results = 4,924
    v2 URL = https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com/api/v2/search/en-gb?q=ma&prefix=true

    Search term = p (All words starting with the letter p)
    v1 search results = 31,796
    v1 URL = https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com:443/api/v1/search/en?q=p&prefix=true&regions=gb
    v2 search results = 4,931
    v2 URL = https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com/api/v2/search/en-gb?q=p&prefix=true

    Search term = a (All words starting with the letter a)
    v1 search results = 14,353
    v1 URL = https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com:443/api/v1/search/en?q=a&prefix=true&regions=gb
    v2 search results = 4,953
    v2 URL = https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com/api/v2/search/en-gb?q=a&prefix=true

    Whatever changes may have been made in v2, the number of results can't differ by such a huge margin. There still is something stopping the results to go beyond 5,000 which is why they all are in four thousand nine hundreds.

    Please look into it at the earliest as v1 shutdown date is just around the corner and then we won't have v1 date to make comparison of v2 data with.

    Thanks

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  • TaisFukushimaTaisFukushima Member, Administrator, Moderator admin
    edited June 2019

    Hello @shahood

    I am sorry for my late reply.

    I've forwarded this to my colleagues in the technical team so hopefully myself or one of them should be able to get back to you - bear with us!

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  • shahoodshahood Member ✭✭
    edited July 2019

    Hi @TaisFukushima @AmosDuveen

    It's been a month and a half since your last reply and 3 months since the issue was originally reported but no solution has been provided yet.

    Please follow it up with ur technical team.

    Thanks!

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  • shahoodshahood Member ✭✭

    Hi @TaisFukushima @AmosDuveen @sobiaanjum

    Another 02 months and no positive reply. Now this issue is more than 5 months old. Kindly look into it and fix it once and for all. Thanks!

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  • TaisFukushimaTaisFukushima Member, Administrator, Moderator admin

    Hello @shahood

    Please accept my apologies for the slowness of this response.

    My colleagues from the technical team have returned to me saying that the Search results are now actually capped at 5000, not 500.

    The second problem mentioned here was due to the way we were handling duplicates in a request with a limit. This should be better now. They have just checked https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com/api/v2/search/en-gb?q=second-story man&amp;prefix=false&amp;limit=500 and it returned 500 (of 644) entries.

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