As part of providing the services to users, an online system stores multiple records that are accessible by users of the online system. When a user provides a search query, the online system extracts morphological and dictionary features from the query. The online system provides the extracted features to a machine learning model as an input. The machine learning model outputs a score for each potential entity type that indicates a likelihood that the search query is for a record associated with the entity type. The output from the machine learning model is used by the online system to select one or more entity types that the user is likely searching for. The online system searches the stored records based on the search query but limits the searching to records associated with at least one of the selected entity types.