The issue seems to have been properly fixed by the new Solr search.

Still a valid bug – reopening.

for example "Universal Jazz" has score 98 and it has aliases "Universal Jazz Germany", "Universal Music Classics & Jazz" and "Universal Music Classics and Jazz Germany"

and if I read correctly, currently aliases is double boosted (2.0) compared to names.
http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/changeset/13662

If you were just searching field name yes that true, but you are not so the concept of perfect match makes no sense. i.e it matches on the name field, but if another label matches on name and alias which is the better match ?

> "Universal Music" is identical to "Universal Music" though, so it should be a perfect match because of that, not because we added it to a list of exceptions.

This is a much better way to describe the problem I tried to describe in SEARCH-308. ("Big Bang" is identical to "Big Bang" so it should be a perfect match, not a low match.)

"Universal Music" is identical to "Universal Music" though, so it should be a perfect match because of that, not because we added it to a list of exceptions.

https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=Warner+Music&type=label&limit=25&method=indexed is another example with the same problem - the exact match is 20th.

SEARCH-282: "Previously we document boosted a hard-coded list of artists and labels to resolve this. Although this approach was not perfect because the list was incomplete it did solve the most common cases, this approach is not working since moving Lucene v3 to Lucene v4 because its creating ridicously large field norms for some reason so currently disabled"

I guess correct fix would be same as you suggest on SEARCH-366: "Could fix by partially adjusting the weightings so that name is more weighted then description and alias"

Hmm, not sure why the boost isn't having effect.

The general thing with hardcoding the boost is for the cases where what the user types may match somthing else but we know they usually mean the lower matching results. Its more obvious with classical composers where the usual behaviour is we want a match on the artist name to do better than a match on only an alias, but for some artists they are better known by their alias so they need a boost. I dont see how we cant hardcode it unless there is something in the database that can help us identify these cases.

all or almost all of the higher scored entries has alias with Universal and Music words.