Question

Is it possible to search race commentaries to find horses who eg”made all,clear,comfortably”

Answer 1

Yes.  

To do this, you'll need to be comfortable using regular expressions.

You can either use SQL directly, or - probably a better idea - a programming language like R.

Here's an example using MySQL:

select meeting_date, course, name from historic_races join historic_runners using (race_id) where finish_position = 1 and in_race_comment regexp "comfortably" and meeting_date >= "2018-01-01";

The above looks for all horses that finished first this year, where the race comment contains the word "comfortably".  Clearly you could refine this search further for specific types of races, horse age (on the basis that younger horses often improve rapidly) etc.