[Developers] Looking for Beyonce

[Arthur van Hoff]

Hi Chris,

I switched over to using the search API, which works, but I have some questions.

When you search for Beyonce the results contains "50 Cent vs. Beyoncé" before "Beyoncé & Stevie Wonder". What determines the order? It would seem that the results where Beyoncé is closer to the start of a string should be listed first.

When you search for Beyonce you find "Swizz Beatz" (huh?). Perhaps it is because the original Wikipedia entry contains a reference to Beyonce? Is there some way to restrict the results only to topics that actually contain the search string in the name or in an alias?

Is it possible to get results without escaped HTML characters?
	
Thanks for your help.

-----Original Message-----
From: developers-bounces at freebase.com [mailto:developers-bounces at freebase.com] On Behalf Of Christopher R. Maden
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:04 PM
To: developers at freebase.com
Subject: Re: [Developers] Looking for Beyonce

Arthur van Hoff wrote:
> How do I query for an artist either by name or by alias? Section
> 3.2.20 of the documentation mentions that there is no way to express
> an OR relationship.  I need to match against either an alias or a
> name because some bands don't have their name listed as an alias.

You may want to try using the search API instead of MQL for these kinds
of queries.

If you want or need to use direct MQL, you will need to execute two 
queries.  You can send them in one envelope or two, depending on your 
requirements; i.e., you could look for the name first, and if it fails, 
then send back a query for the alias, or you could send two queries, one 
for the name and one for the alias, and then see what you found.

This is kind of what the search API is optimized for.  The best examples 
of how to use it are in the freebase-suggest wiki: <URL: 
http://code.google.com/p/freebase-suggest/wiki/FreebaseAPISearch >.

~Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden
Data Architect
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.
<URL: http://www.metaweb.com/ >
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