Systems and methods for returning results to a query based upon topic are disclosed herein. Aspects disclosed can be particularly useful when searching for videos or other media content for which associated textual information are generally relatively sparse compared to other types of content. Text associated with the query can be semantically associated with various domain topics by mapping one or more words included in the query to one or more domain topics based upon a conditional probability of the domain topic given the query. A set of results can be identified based upon a conditional probability of the result given the domain topic.