[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

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
Comments
Hi @shahood,
Thanks for feeding back all of these issues, I have passed them onto our developers to investigate.
Hi @AmosDuveen
Should we expect a fix any time soon?
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
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.
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®ions=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®ions=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®ions=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
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!
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!
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!
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&prefix=false&limit=500 and it returned 500 (of 644) entries.