Hulu announced some improvements to its search functionality today. For one, they have added some shortcuts to the autocomplete feature.
Previously, the autocomplete suggestions would just take a user to the regular search results, but now, the shortcuts offer other options like going straight to the latest episode (for current shows), or the show page (for all shows).
Hulu has also introduced a series of search operators like:
– show
– season
– episode
– type
– date
– site
– people
– title
Use the search operators just like you would with Google. Put a colon after the operator then a space and your query. For example, “people: charlie day” will bring up some episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” starring Charlie Day (actually it brings up some other stuff with the word “day” in it as well, but you get the point).
A nice addition to the search operators fuctionality is that you can use more than one together. Hulu explains:
If you employ multiple search operators, we’ll treat it as an “AND” and try to satisfy all of the operators. For example, let’s say you’d like to watch every pilot episode for every TV show on our site. You could type the following search query:
season:1 episode:1 type:episode
For more information on searching with Hulu, they have posted a search tips page that can be found with a link next to the search box at the bottom of Hulu. You can also read Hulu’s post about the subject for more details.
