The New PlayPhraseMe Search Engine Is Here 🚀
I have been talking about this one for a while. Testing it, rebuilding it, breaking it, fixing it again.
Now it is live.
The new PlayPhraseMe search engine is not a small UI update. It is one of the biggest technical changes I have made to the site in a long time, mostly because the old search was already at its limit.
It was good at finding phrases. It was not built for serious filtering.
People have been asking for these filters for years:
search inside one movie
filter by year
search inside TV episodes
find phrases from a certain actor
narrow results by genre, director, cast, or voice actor
That is now in Clip Search.
Try it here:
https://www.playphrase.me/#/clip-search?language=en&q=hello
Now you can search by text and combine that search with filters for movies, episodes, years, genres, directors, actors, voice actors, and cast.
For example, this link searches for "hello" inside Once Upon a Time in Hollywood:
https://www.playphrase.me/#/clip-search?language=en&q=hello&filters=%7B%22source-kind%22%3A%22movie%22%2C%22imdb%22%3A%22tt7131622%22%7D
This sounds easy from the outside. It was not.
When you have over 40 million phrases, multiple languages, movie metadata, episodes, actors, directors, voice actors, and results that need to update while people are typing, a normal "just add filters" approach does not survive for long.
So I stopped trying to patch the old search and rebuilt the search system properly.
The part that still surprises me: it feels much faster.
In many cases, search processing is now at least 10x faster. The database became around 60x more compact. That also let me remove two servers from the infrastructure.
Most of that is invisible if you just open the site, but it changes a lot for me: fewer moving parts, lower cost, and a better base for the next features.
The new search is already used outside the main clip results too. Phrase suggestions in the left panel now use the new search logic, so common phrase variations should also feel quicker and more useful.
There are still small things to polish. I found a couple of minor issues yesterday evening, nothing critical, but this is a big new system and I expect a few rough edges.
If you see broken filters, weird results, missing metadata, slow queries, or anything confusing, please tell me.
This update exists because people kept asking for it.
Now it is here.
Please try the new search - and please try to break it 🙂
Update / small clarification
A few people asked where the regular search, Favorites, Reels, and other familiar parts of PlayPhraseMe are.
Nothing disappeared 🙂
The link in this post opens Clip Search directly, because this is the new advanced search mode where the new filters are available.
But the regular PlayPhraseMe experience is still there as usual: standard search, Favorites, Reels, and everything else are available from the main site:
Clip Search is just one of the newer modes on the site - not a replacement for the whole website 🙂
Comments (12)
Hi Evgeny, Thanks for creating PlayPhrase. I love using it to learn English. I have a small suggestion. It would be amazing if the search matched phrase patterns instead of only exact phrases. For example, when users search for a phrase, the search could keep the main keywords but allow natural words to appear before, after, or between them, such as different verb forms, articles, pronouns, adjectives, and other common words. This would help users find many more real-life examples without having to search for every possible version of the same phrase. I think this would make PlayPhrase even more useful for English learners. Thanks for considering it!
Hi Evgeny, Playphrase.me is no longer available on iOS, and I really miss it. It was an amazing app for learning English. I hope you’ll bring it back to the App Store soon! 🙏
Thank you so, so much for all the work you've done here. It's so much fun and incredibly useful in the college classroom.
I noticed that Playphrase.me is no longer available on iOS. I used to love this app, and it was one of the most helpful tools for improving my English. I really hope you’ll bring it back to the iOS App Store someday. I’d definitely download it again. Thanks for all your hard work!
Thank you so much! It's great things which will come in handy
whatpoliticssay still needs more work. I love it, but it doesn't work as well as PlayPhraseMe. Hope you can make it a better tool.
Yes, you're right, we need to adapt the playphraseme functionality for politics as well. I will work on it, but currently, there are so few visitors that it's not a priority, meaning I can't allocate resources to it right now. The only thing that might push me is that the search engine there is old, which takes up a lot of RAM, so I need to at least switch to a new engine. Whether I will add new features is another question. But thank you for the reminder, yes, I need to address it. Another future solution is to create collections for playphrase.me under politics. However, I don't think it's worth mixing these entities.
I can search for a specific quote for a specific actor, what amazing !!!! I just typed "Sophie Marceau", and "je suis sûr" and I have a long list of videos, so niiiiice
❤️ thank you for your work! Is there a way for me to help out on the project here and there? I'm a bored but experienced coder AND found you because it's so much fun to play with - so I'm definitely personally invested too 👍
Thank you so much! ❤️ Right now it’s basically just me working on the project, so I’m not really set up for contributors yet. I’m mostly building it solo, with occasional “help” from my son as I teach him programming :) But I really appreciate the offer - and if I ever need help, I’ll definitely reach out!
This update is absolutely wonderful ! I just ended up testing it, searching for some quotes in my favorite movies, for my favorite actors ! It's bringing so much value ! Thanks a lot ! I can't imagine all the different use I can make out of it ! Filtering, finding an actor, looking for a specific quote inside a specific movie, it's so great.
Thank you so much!