Filtering allows you to narrow a list of results down by type or property. Its one of the ways that Freebase differs from traditional search engines or content sites. All of the data within Freebase is typed and organized by properties that can be filtered on.
Let's do our search for 'Miller ' again. Notice the filtering options on the left. Here you can enter more text into the name field, which is like adding another search term. You can also limit your search results by type. For instance if you were to type 'Film Writer' into the the type box and click Find, you should see a list of writers with the name Miller.
You can remove a filter by clicking the 'x' in the filter results list. If you click to remove 'Film writer' and input 'film' and click return, you should see a list of films with the name 'Miller'.
If you are filtering on a list of items of the same type, you can do more complex and interesting searches. The easiest ways to filter on a type are to navigate to it from the types page, search for the type name or click the 'view more like this' menu. For instance, if you navigate to the film type in the film domain, you will see a list of 30 films listed with an image and a summary blurb.
From the filter view of the film type, you can see a number of additional properties displayed such as, directed by, actor, and written by. Any of these properties can be used to filter your list. For instance you could type 'sissy spacek' in the 'starring - actor' field and get a list of films starring Sissy Spacek. You could then limit this down further by adding another actor, say for instance, 'Martin Sheen' and you'd get one result for the film 'Badlands'.
Filtering currently displays the first 7 properties in the type, excluding some properties such as images, the summary as well as dates and numerical values. Future releases will allow you to filter on date ranges and possibly apply operators such as before/after or greater than/less than for integer values.
