Erroneous Usenet Search Results

There are a few issues with the usenet search results, but one of the most obvious is that it can return results that have the wrong season and or episode numbers. As an example, you could search for show id 123 season 4 episode 5 and end up with the results containing all sorts of episodes that are not season 4 episode 5. This isn’t due to mislabeled content, the results even contain accurate metadata saying the episode they’re for. I’ve most recently noticed this with the Newznab API, but I’ve also seen this issue elsewhere.

Another issue, maybe harder to fix though, is that the search can also make incorrect use of certain types of ids. The only case I’ve noticed this so far is that tvdb can have overlapping ids for tv and movies and the results end up erroneously mixed. This means that you can do a Newznab t=tvsearch and end up with movies in the results.