NOTE: Searching and filtering will work best if your video has been accurately transcribed.
First, machine transcription. While you'll rarely encounter problems with "Walmart", "House of Fraser's service" can understandably become "house of razors service".
Second, technical stuff. Note: it's not like Google :)
Basics
Yes you can use Boolean operators, and yes they must be ALL CAPS or they won't work. (And yes, you need to use double quotes for phrases - like Google. A word or a phrase is a "term".)
Boolean operators allow terms to be combined. We support AND, "+", OR, NOT and "-".
OR (or if we want to be really uptight about it, a "soft AND") is the default operator. So if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is applied. OR links two or more terms and finds a match if either or any of the terms exist in a video.
To search for videos that contain either "chicken pie" or just "chowder" use the query:
"chicken pie" chowder
Or use
"chicken pie" OR chowder
AND matches where both terms exist anywhere in a single video. Hence to search for items with BOTH "chicken pie" and "clam chowder", it's
"chicken pie" AND "clam chowder"
To search for videos that *must* contain "clam" and may contain "chowder", use the query:
+clam chowder
The "-" or prohibit operator excludes videos that contain the term after the minus symbol.
To search for documents that contain "clam chowder" but not "tomato soup" use the query:
"clam chowder" -"tomato soup"
Other useful bits and pieces
Title search
Obviously how you title your videos is important for all sorts of reasons but if you want to locate a specific video or set of videos by an element in its or their title, use for example
title:frozen
You don't have to define fields in the rest of your search, so:
title:frozen AND "clam chowder"
would look for a video with "frozen" in the title specifically, and "clam chowder" as a phrase anywhere.
Proximity
To do a proximity search use a tilde and a number at the end of a phrase. If, for example, you want to find videos where "amazon" and "price" are within 6 words of each other:
"amazon price"~6
Wildcards
Although we use word stemming and have a substantial synonym library in place, we find there is the occasional need for wildcard searches. This is fairly simple stuff. Add an asterisk for multiple characters or a question mark for a single character, in the middle or at the end of the word, for example effic*
Fuzzy searching
Because of machine transcription, we support searches based on the Edit Distance algorithm. This allows you to search for a term similar in spelling to your term. Just add a tilde at the end of the term, eg cheese~
Ordering
Default ordering is by relevance. You can use the controls to change to date ordering
Filtering
For filtering, operators work within groups as ORs, and across groups as ANDs.
You may search "chicken" and get 200 results. Your first filter will reduce the overall number of results, then any subsequent filter within that same group is likely to raise that number (there need not be just one filter category in any one video, even in one group). Filters applied in a second group, however, act as ANDs, and will in all likelihood refine the number of hits.
In any group where search and current filtering criteria are matched, options to apply further filters and the number of hits are displayed in light face. Where there are no matches, the filter is greyed out.