Since the search engine is so critical to my site, I've spent many hours trying to make it both powerful and easy to use. Not everything about it necessarily goes without saying, though. The following tips should help ambitious searchers zero in on exactly the clips they want.

basic tips

Recent updates: Want to see what's new on the site? Simply leave the search fields empty, and the results will be returned in the order that they were added to the site, newest clips first.

Keywords: You can use the Keywords field to search for particular scene elements. Try it! It's powerful and fun. I have tried to standardize keywords as much as possible. The best way to get a feel for my keyword choices (such as "OTM gag" instead of the synonymous "detective gag") is simply to do a few searches and look at the keywords within the results. "Special" keywords include countries of origin and "serial" for movie serials.

Multiple search strings: You can use commas to specify multiple search strings within a single field. For example, if you enter "cleave, rope" in the Keywords field and click "Match all," the results will include all scenes containing both a cleave gag and rope bondage. If you instead click "Match any," the results will include all scenes containing either of those elements.

Exclusion searches: The Keywords field has a special feature, in that you can precede any keyword with a minus sign if you wish to exclude all scenes containing a given element. For instance, you could use "-putz, -snuff" if you wanted to avoid both scenes containing male interference and scenes in which the damsel does not survive. Or you could use "-usa" if you wanted only scenes in which we Yanks weren't involved. Note that "Match all" must be selected in order for this to work properly.

advanced tips

Date searches (and a note about soaps): You can specify a date range for each search. This is most useful when searching for movie scenes, since scenes from TV series are listed under the year that the series premiered, which may be somewhat earlier than the episode premiere. This is especially significant in the case of soaps, which tend to run for many decades. In order to reduce the number of odd-looking results, dates for soap scenes will not be displayed in the search results, general searches by date will not return soap scenes, and soap-specific searches will ignore the date-range fields. In other words, as far as the search engine is concerned, soap scenes exist "outside of time."

Alternate titles: Whenever the Internet Movie Database lists a given movie or series, my clips will use the same primary title. However, the search engine still knows about alternate titles. (So, for instance, if you search on "Bodyguard" and wonder why all those "V.I.P." clips come up in addition to the Cindy Crawford scene: it's because "V.I.P. - Die Bodyguards" is the name of that series as shown in Germany.) In general, in order to keep clutter to a minimum, alternate titles are not displayed in the search results. The exception to this rule is that English titles will be listed as "aka" for scenes with non-English primary titles.

Accented characters: When searching for a scene or actress whose name contains an accent, it's usually best to omit the accent and just use the plain letter. However, I've done my best to ensure that all common forms are searchable—so, for instance, Mädchen Amick can be found under "Mädchen," or "Madchen," or "Maedchen." Note that trying to specify an accent by using a key combination definitely will not bring you joy. You need to use the ISO entity name, such as "ä" for the "ä" character in the previous example. If this is all German to you, don't sweat it and just leave off the accent. Or just search on "Amick." :)

Database IDs: Almost every scene on the site can be located by means of its entry number in the Internet Movie Database (with or without the leading "tt"), and over 90% can be found with entry numbers from Brian's database of mainstream scenes. Just use the "ID" field. Webmasters are also welcome to link directly to scenes: sample links look like this, this, or this.

Happy hunting!