Search Criteria

While the Search pane provides natural language searches with additional options, you can use the search criteria a to limit the search results based on exact value selections. You use search criteria to reduce the number of results from the main search results list. Criteria filter the results, removing any that do not match all of the criteria.

When you type your search term, Media Index provides search suggestions to aid in your search. A drop-down list appears with search suggestions built from the index appears when you type three or more characters.

Your indexed search can return assets containing timecode-based metadata, such as assets where the text within markers matches your search query. If you view the search results in Card view, you can click a timecode link to open the asset in the Media pane at the location of the metadata found by your search.

Media Index supports searches based on text analysis and normalization. Your search can return results for terms in different forms of the terms, such as conjugated verbs or plural words. For example, if you search for “elections,” the natural language search can return results for “elect,” “electing,” or “election” in addition to the original term.

If you want to find an exact match for your search term, either enclose the term in quotation marks or use the text field of a search criteria. Criteria return exact results.

Media Index also runs a language-dependent analysis of text to provide indexes. Media Index uses the language and region settings of your system as the default language for searches. You can run a search in a different language. For example, if you need to search for content that contains German text, you can specify German as the language for your search. In this example, using English for the search might not find all assets with German-language text or metadata.

Similarly, if you use Chinese as your search language, Media Index recognizes multi-character words as single search terms. For example, 机器人 (“robot”) is treated as a single word and search results do not include either 机器 (“machine”) or 人 (“man”), although these characters can be used as search terms by themselves because Media Index recognizes them as distinct Chinese words. However, some proper nouns might not be detected as complete words. In these cases, you can enclose the characters in quotation marks (“) to specify a search for an exact text string.

Media Index supports the following language options:

Your MediaCentral administrator can limit the number of languages to use for the indexed search during the Media Index configuration. Your administrator can also set default languages for search across multiple zones if you work with a multi-zone configuration.

Depending on the type of field, criteria offer different prefix options.

• any — All criteria can be set to a neutral mode called “any” where the criteria do not affect the search results. Use this if you want the criterion to display in the Search pane, but you do not want it to affect the search results.

• is set — This search does not take any value but only checks if the field has any data set at all. Using this only returns a result if the criterion has some value set for this field.

Time fields do not have a date component and usually reference a recurring time of day.

When you perform an indexed search, the search query text you type in the search field is used as an exact string. Results are more precise if you know the name of the asset you want to locate. You can also use some operators with your search syntax:

• Wildcard characters — You can use the standard asterisk or question mark anywhere in the words used in the search. Use an asterisk (*) to represent one or more characters in a word, and use a question mark (?) to represent a single character in a word.

Some wildcard prefix searches in Media Index can affect performance of the search due to a large result set. For example, using the search query *a to search a large database might result in slow performance of the indexed search process.

• Fuzziness operator — Use a tilde (~) to include close matches in the search results. For example, typing quikc~ brwn~ foks~ returns items containing “quick brown fox.”

• Proximity operator — Add a tilde (~) and a numeral to your search terms to locate items where the terms are close to each other. For example, typing “fox quick”~5 returns items containing “fox” and “quick” where the words are separated by the specified edit distance. (“Edit distance” refers to the number of operations necessary to transform one string into another.) Results are ranked by relevance, with those closest to the query string ranked highest. In this example, “quick fox” is more relevant than “quick brown fox.”

• Boolean prefixes — You can use a plus (+) or a minus (-) sign as a prefix to force the search to either include or exclude a term. For example, typing quick brown +fox -news causes the search to return results that must contain “fox” and must exclude “news.” In this example, “quick” and “brown” are optional, but their presence improves the relevance of the result.

• Boolean operators — You can include the standard Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT (also written as &&, ||, and !) in your search terms. For example, typing quick OR brown AND fox returns results that must include “brown” and “fox” (because AND takes precedence over OR and applies to terms on either side of the operator) with “quick” as optional. Some search criteria allow you to select Boolean operators — true, false, is set, and not set — from a predefined list.

You must precede reserved characters with a backslash (\) to escape them. The following characters are reserved: + - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /

Most fields in the Search pane are text fields. When you use the Search text field to conduct a search, the search operation assesses the search term in a “natural language” way, performing language analysis, which might lead to different results from what you would expect from a classical text search such as the one in Interplay Production. For example, using the Search text field allows the search to assess root words with their prefixes and suffixes, and some special characters like hyphens (-) are ignored.

However, terms typed in as text criteria perform result in exact matches, including white space and special characters used in the text fields. You can use text criteria if you want to match an asset name or ID exactly. This is similar to enclosing the search expression in the search text box in quotation marks. For example, if you type 928_myfile in the search text box, the search matches both 928 and myfile. If you type “928_myfile” the search matches only this exact string. This is also how the text criteria behave.

The search criteria menus provide the following search prefixes:

• is — Matches the string exactly, including spaces. For example, “blue” matches “blue” but not “blueberry.”

• contains — Matches substrings, including spaces. For example, “blue” matches both “blue” and “blueberry.”