Searching and Autocomplete

You can search for information on Freebase the same way you would on any website, by entering a term in the Search box and clicking Search. Our autocomplete feature, however, can help you go directly to the topic you’re looking for without needing to read through a list of search results.

Let’s say you’re searching for the comic The Dark Knight to see what year it was published. As you start to type Dark Knight into the search box, autocomplete will begin suggesting matches. When you’ve typed in the full name, you’ll see a list of Dark Knight topics in Freebase. Beneath each topic name you’ll see its type; there’s a Dark Knight film, tv episode, and musical track, among others. If you move your cursor over any of those topic names, you’ll also see a brief excerpt from the topic description. From this you can learn that the full title of The Dark Knight comic is Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

If one of the autocomplete suggestions is the topic you’re looking for, just move your cursor over it to highlight it in blue, then click. If you want to search all of Freebase instead, finish entering your search terms, click Search, and you’ll get a list of the first 30 topics matching your search term. You can then narrow your results further by entering a type in the Type box on the search results page.

A couple tricks for using search and autocomplete:

• If you already know the type for the topic you want, you can enter that as well, in this format: search term type:/domain/type (so, Dark Knight type:/film/film will only show you Dark Knight topics typed as film).
• If you think that the topic you’re looking for is within a specific domain, you can use the Search box on that domain’s homepage to search only within that domain. You could go to the Film Domain, for example, and search on Dark Knight, or the Comic Books domain.
• Finally, you can also use the Filter View to search for topics within a type. See the topic Using the Filter View  for more information.