I was searching for SuperGirl 1x01, which technically hasn’t aired yet, but rather than just returning it, I was getting lots of other results returned:
In this case Sonarr searched by title, which your indexers returned various results for, this is the indexers fault, but Sonarr shows all results to you so you can pick the right one.
I’m having this same problem. I have 2 indexers (nzbndx and oznzb), one I have been using for over a year and the other for just a month or 2. They never had this problem before, but both started getting results showing up for other episodes when doing a manual search. It seems to have started happening after sonarr installed a recent update, but I’m not 100% sure if the timing is exact, I just know it was close to the time of the update (so that may be a red herring).
Although your search string specifies “ep=5” it’s also giving you other episodes. Try tweaking the search URL manually to determine why this is happening.
The indexer is also indicating that they do support episode searching:
Thanks for the help. I’ll talk to the indexers. Is there a config file I can edit to override the way it searches? Was there something in the way this works that changed recently in sonarr that could explain why this stopped working?
Your indexer doesn’t properly handle query + season/episode searches - I believe this issue was fixed some time ago, but it might depend how their service is setup.
TVRage went down, in response to that NN+ (Newznab) was updated to support additional parameters, which gives Sonarr a way to request which parameters the indexer supports for searching, if that request is handled by the indexer Sonarr could use (if supported) another ID to search (TVDB or TVMaze) and not rely on title searches which aren’t as reliable.
If q= isn’t the preferred option, why would Sonarr utilize that in the search. The indexer is also indicating that it supports other items, and the first line in the log is:
With nzbndx, it appears that if the show isn’t available on the indexer then I see a bunch of results for other episodes, but if the indexer has the episode then only it shows up. It also appears that searches with the q parameter ignore the season and episode parameters. Does sonarr fall back to using the q parameter if the tvdbid and tvmazeid search don’t find anything?
Same as above, there are several indexers that do a standard query and one or more does not process the additional parameters correctly. As a result, results aren’t filtered on season & episode match.