Search Tips for the InterPig Database

If you are having trouble finding the item that you want, try searching using the different categories. These include:

Other strategies include entering 'mice' for finding different mouse pigment mutants, 'cell' for different cell cultures or antibodies for all antibodies in the database. It is also possible that what you want is not in the database. If you cannot find what you need in this database, please e-mail me, (Bill Oetting) and I will do a further check. If there are several individuals in this situation, we may initiate a 'items wanted' section in the PASPCR newsletter.

Advanced Search Tips

Each term may be preceded by the standard Boolean operators not, and, or or. If you search for "dogs not pizzas", you'll find all documents containing the word "dogs" except those documents which also contain the word "pizzas". If you type in "and hot and dog and pizzas", you'll find only those documents which contain all three search terms. The default value is or. Thus, a search for "hot dog pizzas" would return pages with at least one of the three terms.

Altavista's shorthand notation works too. A search on "dogs -hot" is equivalent to the first example, and "+hot +dog +pizzas" will return the same documents as the second. If a search term has at least one capital letter, like "parIS", the search will be case sensitive with respect to that word - that is, only documents containing "parIS" will be found. On the other hand, lowercase words like "paris" will generate hits from "Paris", "PARIS", or "parIS".

To group a collection of words, use quotes. For example, the query "Zoltan Milosevic" (quotes included) would not generate a hit from "Slobodan Milosevic met with Zoltan Smith". Without quotes, the sentence would count. Boolean operators can also act on quotations: a search on '+the +kitten not "the kitten"' would return only those documents where "the" and "kitten" appear separately.

Intermediate Search finds words, not strings. A search for "in" would turn up only that word, not "bin", "inside", or "acquaintance". To perform a string search, preface your term with the dollar sign - a query on "$in" would find all words lists above. Note that more complex wildcard searches using the asterisk are not permitted. Including the asterisk in your query will return a list of all files, but that's its only function.

These rules are based on Altavista's query syntax; a look at their Search Tips may prove useful. The original Simple Search was created by Matt Wright and can be found at Matt's Script Archive. Like Matt's script, our version is freeware and can easily be set up on most websites.

Intermediate Search, Version 1.1 is Copyright 1997 (freeware) by Fluid Dynamics.

Back to the InterPig DataBase Search page

This page was modified last on August 28, 1998.