Power Search for iTunes is a feature that allows many additional search parameters to be used when looking for all media types offered on iTunes, including music, apps, movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, and iTunes University. But what was once built directly into iTunes has been removed by Apple for some reason or another from the latest versions of iTunes 11, and unlike other things gone missing, now there’s no known way to return the enhanced search feature as a native functionality.
But not all is lost, because it turns out that Power Search can be accessed and used in iTunes 11 by using some fancy URL magic, which you can open from any web browser. Yes, you use a web browser to access a feature in iTunes… that may sound weird but there’s not much to this, though you will need to click through from Safari, Chrome, or Firefox to get Power Search working.
Power Search URL’s for iTunes 11
The first link is the general “all” media category search, which will look through every single thing offered from iTunes, whether apps, movies, or music. It defaults to having two options, ‘title’ and ‘artist’, but can be narrowed down into categories by pulling down the “Power Search” menu within iTunes:
If you’d rather jump directly into sectional power searches, use the following URL’s instead:
Specific iTunes Category Power Search URLs
Click any topic link to launch iTunes Power Search for that category:
This is undoubtedly nice for all media categories, but Power Search is particularly useful music, which allows you to search by artist, composer, song, album, and genre.
For movie buffs, Power Search may be the most useful though, because you can search iTunes movies by actor, director / producer, year, closed captioning, whether it’s available for rent, amongst other search parameters like genre that are still included in the general iTunes search features.
Why Power Search went missing by default in iTunes 11 is a bit of a mystery, but considering it’s popularity perhaps we’ll see a resurrection in future versions of iTunes. In the meantime, use these URLs, they should work for Mac OS X and Windows.
These Power Search URL strings first appeared on the Apple Discussion Forums and resurfaced recently when posted on Kirkville, who figured out you can use the “itms://” prefix to bypass the interstitial iTunes page, what a great find!
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