Interactive Search desperately needs a custom search query override — real-world example with Dark (2017)

Feature Requests
1

I’m requesting the ability to manually enter or override search terms directly within Sonarr’s Interactive Search interface.

I recently spent well over an hour troubleshooting a request for Dark (2017) , a popular series.

Here’s what happened:

  • Sonarr automatically searched TorrentLeech through Prowlarr for the correct series and seasons.
  • Sonarr returned unrelated titles such as Dark Matter and The Dark , while failing to show the correct releases.
  • Prowlarr could find the correct Dark (2017) 1080p season packs when I searched using the year.
  • The tracker had suitable, well-seeded releases available, but Sonarr’s Interactive Search wouldn’t let me modify the query to locate them.
  • I ultimately had to download the torrent files manually, assign the qBittorrent category, and configure individual seeding limits.
  • Once added, Sonarr correctly recognized and imported the episodes.

My request: Please add an optional free-text search field to Interactive Search so users can override the generated search query, while keeping Sonarr’s existing release matching and rejection information.

A per-series alternate search-term override would also be valuable for automatic searching.

I understand Sonarr is designed for automation, but that makes having a fallback when automatic searches fail even more important.

This is a serious usability gap. The releases existed, Sonarr could recognize them, and my indexer connection worked. What was missing was a simple way to correct the search query without leaving Sonarr.

I’d appreciate the developers reconsidering this feature, especially given how long similar requests have existed.

1 Like
2

I don’t know what version of Sonarr you are on but in the 5.0 beta I have noticed many many more non related series being shown when doing a Interactive Search, so being able to click a button once the search is done and narrow the results there would be simply fantastic.

1 Like
3

I am on Version 4.0.20.3012 but I agree 100% with you! I think even a small change to this area would be really helpful. Hopefully they consider it.

4

It’s not something we have any short term plans to add right now.

Sonarr returns the results it receives from your indexers (Prowlarr in this case).

Which search terms were actually searched (Sonarr’s logs will show this as will Prowlarr’s history)?
Which term did you search manually that yielded the results you expect?
Did you try using that search directly in Prowlarr? Did it yield the expected results?

You can setup a custom filter to exclude anything that doesn’t match the expected series, this will exclude things that could be a match, but Sonarr was unable to determine it.