Method and subsystem for searching media content within a content-search-service system

Various embodiments of the present invention include concept-service components of content-search-service systems which employ ontologies and vocabularies prepared for particular categories of content at particular times in order to score transcripts prepared from content items to enable a search-service component of a content-search-service system to assign estimates of the relatedness of portions of a content item to search criteria in order to render search results to clients of the content-search-service system. The concept-service component processes a search request to generate lists of related terms, and then employs the lists of related terms to process transcripts in order to score transcripts based on information contained in the ontologies.