# Search and scope prefixes

Narrow a Kochab search to movies, TV, music, sport and more by typing a scope before your term.

Canonical: https://kochab.io/docs/search/

Search looks across every catalog service in the active stack at once. When that is broader
than you want, type a **scope** before your term.

```
tv: the bear
movie: dune
artist: shpongle
```

The app hints at this under the search field, but only names a few. The full set is below.

## Every scope, and what it accepts

Any alias in a row does the same thing. They are matched case-insensitively.

| Scope | Type any of |
|---|---|
| Movies | `movie:` `movies:` `film:` `films:` |
| TV | `tv:` `show:` `shows:` `series:` |
| Music | `music:` `audio:` `artist:` `artists:` |
| Sport | `sport:` `sports:` |
| Anime | `anime:` |
| Books | `book:` `books:` `ebook:` `ebooks:` |
| Audiobooks | `audiobook:` `audiobooks:` |
| Software | `pc:` `software:` `iso:` |

A scope narrows both catalog results and indexer releases, so `tv: the bear` searches your
libraries and your indexers for the series rather than for anything matching those words.

## Colons in titles, and scopes with nothing after them

Kochab only treats a prefix as a scope when it recognizes it. `Mission: Impossible` searches
for the film - `mission` is not a scope, so the whole phrase is searched as written.

A bare scope with no term after it is searched as plain text instead of running an empty
scoped query, so `tv:` on its own still returns results.

## When a scope does not help

- **Nothing is configured to answer it.** An `audiobook:` search needs an indexer that carries audiobooks in the
  stack. With none, the scope is understood and the results are empty.
- **You want a specific release rather than a title.** That is a different search: open a title
  and use its release search, which queries indexers directly and shows the individual releases
  with their sizes, ages and seeders.
- **You want a subtitle.** Bazarr's manual subtitle search is reached from a title, not from
  here.

## Related

- [Add and configure a service](/docs/add-a-service/) - getting catalogs and indexers connected
  so there is something to search.
- [Service setup guides](/docs/service-setup/) - per-service connection details.