Is iTunes search API working correctly?

Question

I’m trying to search all film with word “Seven”. It found 50 films. But some films and its description does not contain word “Seven”. For example film with trackId = 421072264 not contain word “Seven”.

Is iTunes search API working correctly?

https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=Seven&entity=movie

I attached response to Search%3DSeven.txt file.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55328092/Search%3DSeven.txt

Answer 1

Yes this is working correctly, the search defaults to a broader set of data to search on when no attribute parameter is specified in the query.

You can reduce the search parameters by setting a value for attribute the the query, however this will still not stop it from returning films with 7 in their title, this seem to just be a quirk of the search algorithm.

https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=Seven&entity=movie&attribute=movieTerm

Weirdly this returns "Fast & Furious 5 - 7 Collection" before "Seven" which doesn't make much sense.

If it needs to be more precise then a id search can be done which would only return the specified movie

https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=534912090

See this link for more details on how to modify the search query and lookup searches: https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api/#searching