Search suggestions FAQ

When you use the search feature at the top of almost all pages on IMDb, you'll see a drop-down list of suggested titles and people that may match what you're looking for.

The goal of this feature is to help you save time and navigate more quickly to your desired search result. If we don't have a suggestion, or you don't see the title or person you're looking for, you can click "See all results..." to see the search results page.

There are a couple of reasons you may not see the feature:

• You have disabled Javascript support in your browser. The feature requires Javascript to work.
• If there is no suggestion available for your search term, no drop-down will appear.

Our suggestions are generated from thousands of our most popular titles and people.

Due to a limited amount of space, we then provide up to six suggestions from those popular results, and also allow you to navigate to our search results page to see everything.

The order of results is determined by a combination of factors, including relevance and popularity.

Our search suggestions feature is a bit different than a feature you might be familiar with on Google or Bing, sometimes called "autocomplete".

Autocomplete takes the first few characters that you type in, and recommends keywords.

For example, on Google, if you start to type the letters "new" they'll suggest "news" and "new york times".

Our system tries to match full titles and names to the characters and keywords you are typing, taking you directly to a relevant detail page.

Currently, we are focused on providing suggestions for titles and names, though we hope to expand search suggestions to other categories in the future.

If you're looking for a character or company, you can select these in the right hand drop down at the end of the search bar or click "See all results" to navigate to the search results page.

No, not directly. The Search Suggestions feature uses a combination of relevancy and popularity to recommend and rank results.

As titles and people become more popular, they are more likely to show up. We'll also be monitoring customer feedback and usage closely to continuously improve our system for choosing suggestions.