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Information about the search function

The search function implemented in Zoographia Germaniae is a non-indexing search script written in PHP that only searches HTML documents of a given animal group. You can use the search function to find documents that contain names or other query words within a taxon. For example, the query Drosophila entered on the Drosophilidae main page will return all documents assigned to this family that contain the word Drosophila. However, the same input on e.g. the Nymphalidae main page will not return results.

The search script has certain general features and limits:

The search script cannot recognize or process special characters (e.g. German umlauts ä, ö, ü, or the ligated sz, ß). If your query contains these characters, the search script will not return results.

All query terms are linked by AND; thus the script will only return HTML documents that contain all query terms.

The maximum number of separate query terms is limited to 3. All terms beyond this limit will be ignored. The maximum length for the entire query is 70 characters.

(Example: Entering Drosophila melanogaster fasciata nigriventris will generate the query Drosophila AND melanogaster AND fasciata).

The minimal number of letters in a query or query term is 2. Empty queries or queries containing terms comprising only a single character will not be processed.

The search script does not discriminate between upper and lower case letters.

(Example: The query drosophila will return documents that contain drosophila or Drosophila).

By default, the search script performs wild-card searches for all query terms.

(Example: The query Droso melano will return documents that contain Drosophila melanogaster, but also documents that contain e.g. Drosophilidae and melanotarsis, or Pseudodrosophila and submelanoides.

In certain cases, wild-card searches may be too unspecific and return too many documents. If you wish to search for exact matches, please type a single dot . before your query (don´t type a blank between the dot and your query). All query terms will then be used for exact matching rather than wild-card matching.

(Example: The query .Meigen Tipula will only match documents that contain these two words exactly, but not words like meigeni or tipulaeformis).

The search results will be displayed on a new page, but a link to the previous page is provided on the results page.

The performance (=speed) of the search script depends on the current processor load of the server. Thus, the performance may vary substantially, even for the same query depending on the time of day and server traffic. If you experience long waiting times, please try again a little later.