The search function

Introduction

This document explains how to use Aminet's search function efficiently. Note that it only deals with the search function of Aminet's web interface - if you're interested in searching Aminet from a FTP or ADT client, refer to the explanation of the ADT protocol.

Simple search vs. advanced search

Aminet's web interface offers two different search functions: The simple search, which is available at the top right corner of every page of the web interface, will search through all filenames and short: lines (i.e. the 40 char descriptions of each file).

The advanced search is available by selecting "Search" from the menu at the left side of every page on Aminet. It will let you search filenames, descriptions or whole readmes and can filter the search results by date, architecture or directory.

Supported wildcards

If you just enter a search term that does not contain any special characters (see below), Aminet will find all matches containing your search term - i.e. 'foo' will actually search for '#?foo#?' and will return all strings containing 'foo'.

The search function also accepts wildcards: Just like under AmigaDOS, #? will match anything, while ? will match a single character. Please note that as soon as you use wildcards, searching will try to match the exact phrase you entered, so you need to say '#?foo#?' to match all strings containg foo while 'foo#?' will only find strings starting with foo.

A good example is to search filenames for lha#? - this will find all filenames starting with 'lha' and is the best way to find the actual LhA executable without getting all LhA archives listed.

Note: Instead of #?, you can also use * or %.

Examples

search for lha#? - find all package names starting with 'lha'
search for Architecture: ppc-amigaos - find all AmigaOS 4 packages
search for DATE older 1992 - find all packages older then 1992
search for filename = Quake and Architecture = ppc-morphos - find Quake ports for MorphOS

Sorting search results

Search results can be sorted by name (which is the default), version, path, number of downloads, size, date or description. Simply click on one of the column headers to sort the currently listed search results by that particular criterium.

Note that this applies to Aminet directory listings aswell, as from a technical point of view they are simply search results aswell.