alternative sources search with all titles

[sfarmani]

Describe your suggested feature

I love the find alternative sources feature. It's one of the best I've seen for migrating.

One major flaw I've seen though is when a manga has multiple different names.
For example: if you have "fire brigade of flames" and want to migrate to a different source, it won't also search for "fire force" or "Enen no Shouboutai"

The normal search functionality already does this. I ask that the alternate searching engine also has this feature.

(Small side note, I wish the searching didn't take so long. I think it's due to the captcha, I'm wondering if it can be changed to ask for captcha after I click onto a source instead?)

Acknowledgements

• This is not a duplicate of an existing issue. Please look through the list of open issues before creating a new one.

[MariusAlbrecht]

I don't actually know what's happening under the hood but I assume both features just delegate to the source's search functionality. I also assume Kotatsu makes sure the things in the "Alternatives" tab are the same exact manga by filtering out the results with the same name.

One major flaw I've seen though is when a manga has multiple different names.
For example: if you have "fire brigade of flames" and want to migrate to a different source, it won't also search for "fire force" or "Enen no Shouboutai"

How is the app supposed to know these three names are actually all the same manga?

The normal search functionality already does this. I ask that the alternate searching engine also has this feature.

The normal search functionality also returns lots of stuff that isn't exactly the same manga, which is exactly the point of search: to show similar/relevant things. Showing that in "Alternatives" isn't acceptable.

(Small side note, I wish the searching didn't take so long. I think it's due to the captcha, I'm wondering if it can be changed to ask for captcha after I click onto a source instead?)

You have to imagine the app literally opening all the websites and using their search functionality to search for the thing you put into the kotatsu search bar. Kotatsu can't do anything about the speed of that. It also can't do anything about Chaptchas because the websites decide when to show them or not show them.

[sfarmani]

I'm not here to argue or make assumptions on how the system works. I've only gathered what my observations show and put in a suggestion. My suggestion is something for the dev's to decide if its useful to look into.

Thank you.

[MariusAlbrecht]

Don't forget that this is a FOSS project. Refusing to discuss the details of the feature you're requesting someone else implement for you is a weird look imo.

[sfarmani]

I'm just a user that wants to give some feedback

Thanks

[Caellian]

Refusing to discuss the details of the feature you're requesting someone else implement for you is a weird look imo.

@MariusAlbrecht No need to be so abrasive, not your project. Instead of driving people away from the project with negativity, it would be beneficial if you provided a better understanding of the problem and then linked back to it when similar issues crop up.

How is the app supposed to know these three names are actually all the same manga?

Some sources provide alternative names (like mangajinx), kotatsu already scrapes them well, the only problem is that they're often stored in a single field (string), separated with ;/,, which can be part of the name. So looking up different names won't work that well in some cases (and this can't be fixed). However, it would be possible to perform multiple searches if some source separated them somehow (wrapped each name in <span> or something like that).

The root problem is that there's no definitive catalogue of all manga that exists, even websites like MyAnimeList don't contain a lot of semi-popular manga and things get even worse when you look at niche things like hentai. This prevents Kotatsu from offering a polished feel like Netflix does because Kotatsu doesn't have a centralized database of all manga (huge; very hard to maintain).

A solution to this is external and unlikely - websites need to provide metadata in <head> tags that would allow scrapers like Kotatsu to easily differentiate manga (alternative names, MyAnimeList ID, ...). If Kotatsu were a paid product, it would maybe be viable for the devs to build some partially automated categorization infrastructure using LLMs and then hire someone to comb through the data and clean it up - but it's not.

Websites don't like scraping because it diverts ad money so they'll never go for something like that and make it easier for scrapers.

While alternative title lookup could possibly be implemented, it would triple the time (assuming there's three alt. names) it takes to find alternatives. Doing this in background is possible but would make the app sluggish or unresponsive on low-end devices (most tablets). It could maybe be done with throttling and the results cached so it shows up right away - but again, it won't be perfect.

As for performance, as @MariusAlbrecht said, Kotatsu has to load each page like a browser would in most cases.

I do agree it would be very cool if you could look up Naruto from alternative sources without having to scroll through hentai, fanfics, etc.

[sfarmani]

That makes a lot of sense, thank you for the response