Tips to use EBI new search interface-“EB-eye”
January 4, 2007
EMBL-EBI launched its new website interface with powerful search engine called he “EB-eye”, a powerful search engine allowing instant searches of all the EBI’s databases from a single query.
EB-eye Search is developed on top of the Apache Lucene project framework, which is an Open-source, high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It uses this technology to index EBI databases in various formats (e.g. flatfiles, XML dumps, OBO format, etc.) and provides very fast access to the EBI’s data resources. The system allows the user to search globally across all EBI databases or individually in selected resources by using an Advance search.
1. Simple search
(i)boolean operators
* AND – (default) meaning that term1 AND term2 must exist in the searched documents. eg.cytochrome AND c
* OR – meaning that either term1 OR term2 must exist.eg.cytochrome OR c
* NOT – meaning that term1 must not be present in any of the displayed documents (e.g. excludes documents containing the term1). eg.glutathione NOT transferase
* + ‘+term1’ – The document must contain the term1.
* – ‘-term1’ – Prohibit operator: The document must not contain term1.
At the bottom of any results page there is a ‘Refine your search box’. This one will allow the user to add terms to the query and automatically appends additional AND operators to the search.
(ii)Term Modifiers:
* ‘*’ – as in ‘gluta*’ (glutacin, glutamate, glutamic, etc.)
* ‘?’ – as in ‘b?ind’ (bind, bond, band, etc.)
(iii) Gouping terms together using parenthesis e.(reductase OR transferase) AND glutathione
2. Advanced Search
(i) Searches with all the words in a string
(ii) Searches of the exact phrase – quoted string
(iii) Searches with at least one of the words in the string
(iv) Searches that display results where none of the words in the input string are present
3. Domain Specific Search
Allows the user to narrow searches to specific databases