Advertisers want to deliver their message in a relatively short period of time. This leads to the product name, company name and other identifying features being repeated frequently during a commercial broadcast. Transcript information can be used to detect commercials by detecting frequently occurring words in the commercials. This can also be used to identify an individual commercial from other commercials. Once the individual commercials have been identified, the transcript information corresponding to each commercial can be stored in a database to identify the commercial in subsequent broadcasts, or to provide a search mechanism for searching a particular commercial in the database.