Techniques for contextual search on multimedia content are provided. An example method includes extracting entities associated with multimedia content, wherein the entities include values characterizing one or more objects represented in the multimedia content, generating one or more query rewrite candidates based on the extracted entities and one or more terms in a query related to the multimedia content, providing the one or more query rewrite candidates to a search engine, scoring the one or more query rewrite candidates, ranking the scored one or more query rewrite candidates based on their respective scores, rewriting the query related to the multimedia content based on a particular ranked query rewrite candidate and providing for display, responsive to the query related to the multimedia content, a result set from the search engine based on the rewritten query.