iofilm : Search help

Your search query is broken up into separate words and then looks for film reviews that match those words. You can search by title (e.g Titanic) , person (e.g. de Niro or James Cameron), keywords (e.g. horror) or any combination of these. The search does not look for keywords in the text of reviews or names of reviewers. (Go here to browse by reviewer).

Case & punctuation

The search is case-insensitive meaning that if you type in "tom cruise" or "Tom Cruise" or "TOM CRUISE" you will see the same search results. All punctuation symbols (except wildcards) are removed when the search is made. The order of words does not matter.

Common words ignored

To increase the search accuracy, common words like "the" are ignored, as are single letters. (Fortunately, there is no review of Costa-Gavras's Z in the database.)

Ranking the results

Results are returned ten per page and sorted in order of relevance. A film that matched two of your words will be listed before a film that matched only one. Alternatively, if only one match was found the search will automatically bring up that review page.

Refining your search using "All"

The initial search is made for films matching all of the words you give. Subsequently, on the search results page, you will see a checkbox for "All" which you can check or uncheck as appropriate.

Ticking the "All" box means the search will only return reviews which match all of the words specified. If, for example, you search for "American Beauty" without checking the all box then any review that matches one or other of the keywords will count as a match (though a review that matches both ranks higher). If the all box is checked then only reviews that match both the words will be returned (i.e. American Movie, Venus Beauty, etc. wouldn't be listed).

Using wildcards

The initial search looks for exact matches only. On the results page you will see a "wildcards" checkbox. If this is checked you can use the wildcard symbols dot (.) or underscore (_) to represent "exactly one of any character".

For example, say you wanted to find someone called "Smith" or "Smyth" you would put in "Sm.th" or "Sm_th" (this would also find Smuth, Smoth, Smzth and so on).

Use asterisk (*) or percent sign (%) to represent "any number of any character".

For example, a wildcard search for "Ste%en Sp%berg" would find any combination of "Steven" or "Stephen" and "Spielberg" or "Speilberg".

Misspellings and "soundalikes"

The search does not support negated matches or sequences of words and does not use any "sounds alike" matches to catch misspellings.

What is a "negated match"? It is a search term that uses the word NOT or minus sign like "American NOT Beauty" or "American -Beauty" i.e. you are requesting reviews that match on the word "American", but don't also have the word "beauty" so you would get "American Pie, American Movie, American History X etc.