Advanced Search

Overview

Advanced search lets users search individual data fields instead of all fields combined, like normal search. They are performed using the format field_name:"terms to search for"

For example, if you wanted to find just tracks in albums named “dance hits”, you could search for album:"dance hits"

These searches can also be grouped together into boolean phrases, such as album:"dance hits" AND mood:"upbeat"

Fields

These are the fields supported by advanced search. They are case-insensitive and if you change your site’s terminology, you can use your custom terms instead.

See the next section for an explanation of how terms entered in each field are parsed.

  • Album: word boundary search on name
  • Artist: word boundary search on name
  • BPM: exact match search
  • Catalog: word boundary search on names and descriptions of catalogs
  • Cue Type: word boundary search, favoring exact matches
  • Custom Fields: full text search (use the name of your custom field in quotation marks, e.g., "My Custom Field":"terms go here")
  • Description: full text search
  • Genre: word boundary search, favoring exact matches
  • Label: word boundary search on names and descriptions of labels
  • Lyric: full text search
  • Mood: exact match search
  • Publishers: word boundary search on names
  • Style: exact match search
  • Tempo: word boundary search, favoring exact matches
  • Title: full text search
  • Writers: word boundary search on names

Term Parsing

Terms entered in each field are parsed differently.

  • Full text search: Entered values are tokenized along whitespace, converted to lowercase, stemmed to remove common English endings, e.g., dancing will match dance or dances, and split along word delimiters, e.g., Indy500 will match indy and 500. Entering multiple terms will require all terms to be present in matches (AND search) but you can manually include the word OR in between terms to change this.
  • Exact match search: Only values that exactly match the entered term are returned. For example, bpm:10 will only return tracks with exactly 10 BPM. For multivalued fields, like mood, the exact match can be to any single mood.
  • Word boundary search: Term entered is case-insensitively searched for exact matches as whole words. For example, if you search catalog:ten, it will match Ten hits and Top ten records but not Attendance because the ten only appears in the middle of a word instead of by itself.
  • Word boundary search, favoring exact matches: If the term entered case-insensitively exactly matches an item, the search only returns matches for that item. Otherwise, it’s a word boundary search.