27. A method of searching electronic program guide (EPG) data, comprising: receiving a text search string by way of a search string receiver, the text search string containing one or more text terms for searching program titles and one or more attribute terms for searching program characteristics; normalizing the text search string by removing or converting symbols in the text search string to form searchable terms, the normalizing further comprising: applying spell checking to the text string, identifying a word as being misspelled, and appending a corrected form of the word identified as being misspelled to the searchable terms to conduct a conditional search based on the corrected form of the word; determining, by a processor, one or more known attribute terms by comparing the searchable terms with a list of known attributes for identifying the known attribute terms, the list of known attributes relating to non-title characteristics of programs searchable in the EPG data; identifying as text terms remaining terms not identified as known attribute terms; performing a text search of program title data in the EPG data for each text term identified from the text search string to obtain first intermediate results; performing an attribute search in the EPG data for each known attribute term identified from the text search string to obtain second intermediate results; conducting an alternate attribute search of EPG data using one or more of the text terms to obtain third intermediate results for determining whether the one or more text terms are attribute terms not listed in the list of known attributes; conducting an alternate text search using one or more of the known attribute terms identified by comparing the searchable terms with the list of attributes to acquire additional information to obtain fourth intermediate results for verifying that the known attribute terms are not text terms; and performing one of combining, ranking, and filtering the first, second, third and fourth intermediate results from the text and attribute searches for displaying search results conforming to the text search string, the ranking comprising lowering a relevancy ranking of hits resulting from the conditional search on the corrected form of the word when search results are obtained based on the word identified as being misspelled.
27. A method of searching electronic program guide (EPG) data, comprising: receiving a text search string by way of a search string receiver, the text search string containing one or more text terms for searching program titles and one or more attribute terms for searching program characteristics; normalizing the text search string by removing or converting symbols in the text search string to form searchable terms, the normalizing further comprising: applying spell checking to the text string, identifying a word as being misspelled, and appending a corrected form of the word identified as being misspelled to the searchable terms to conduct a conditional search based on the corrected form of the word; determining, by a processor, one or more known attribute terms by comparing the searchable terms with a list of known attributes for identifying the known attribute terms, the list of known attributes relating to non-title characteristics of programs searchable in the EPG data; identifying as text terms remaining terms not identified as known attribute terms; performing a text search of program title data in the EPG data for each text term identified from the text search string to obtain first intermediate results; performing an attribute search in the EPG data for each known attribute term identified from the text search string to obtain second intermediate results; conducting an alternate attribute search of EPG data using one or more of the text terms to obtain third intermediate results for determining whether the one or more text terms are attribute terms not listed in the list of known attributes; conducting an alternate text search using one or more of the known attribute terms identified by comparing the searchable terms with the list of attributes to acquire additional information to obtain fourth intermediate results for verifying that the known attribute terms are not text terms; and performing one of combining, ranking, and filtering the first, second, third and fourth intermediate results from the text and attribute searches for displaying search results conforming to the text search string, the ranking comprising lowering a relevancy ranking of hits resulting from the conditional search on the corrected form of the word when search results are obtained based on the word identified as being misspelled. 29. The method as recited in claim 27 , wherein the list of known attributes contains metadata about an attribute in the list of known attributes to guide a search using the attribute.