Meilisearch: Improving Jellyfin search results (and speed!) by 999%
I stumbled upon a weird issue recently!
When I tried to search for an anime movie in Jellyfin, the search result never showed up! But, I'm completely sure I have the movies in my server and I didn't have any typo, "Dragon Ball" should be correctly written, right?
Turns out, Jellyfin is naming the anime library by their original language. This makes any "search by title" useless if you don't know the original name. For example, Dragon Ball translates to "Doragon Bōru Zetto".
Meilisearch plugin
Meilisearch is an open-source service (can be self-hosted!) that acts as a fast search engine. It can be run standalone with NodeJS or Docker. "Fast" is an understatement, it's lightning fast.
Meilisearch is exciting, you can search by title, even if you fat fingered any letter, or even better, by WHAT HAPPENS IN THE SHOW! Even by the characters!
For example, searching by "Dragon Ball Z" now returns all related results to Dragon Ball, and searching by specific characters, like "Jiren", returns the related episodes!
Video in real-time. You can't be THIS FAST!
Setting up the Meilisearch server instance is easy. Spin up a docker container or use their installation script in a LXC!.
To integrate with jellyfin, I'm using this Jellyfin Meilisearch plugin and I followed their 5-steps guide to set-up. Sounds complicated but it was very quick to set-up.
Compatibility with Jellyfin Enhanced
Jellyfin Enhanced is another plugin that, among other things, adds Jellyseerr support in your search bar, allowing to request movies/shows without leaving your Jellyfin server. 10/10 would recommend again!
I noticed that since I added Meilisearch plugin it did slow down the Jellyseerr integration.
After researching for a while, I found out that if you forgot to supply a TMDB API Key in the Jellyfin Enhanced's configuration, Jellyseerr's search results will take a few seconds more to show up with the default Jellyfin's search engine.
When I added Meilisearch to my Jellyfin's plugin mixture, Jellyseerr results slowed even more, it was taking more than 10 seconds to show anything.
But when I added the TMDB API Key to Jellyfin Enhanced plugin settings, the results got much faster, to less than 5 seconds. Don't forget to add that TMDB API key!
Jellyfin's v10.11 update was great, their database migration was fantastic and the default search engine is very good and fast enough, but if you want even faster or multi-language proof search capabilities, give the Meilisearch plugin a try!
Have a good day!