OpenHelix provides a search interface that will help you to locate the appropriate resource for your needs. The interface searches our tutorial materials and associated descriptions, our blog posts, and documentation at selected sites--some of which permit us to crawl their site for content, and some may not. OpenHelix's search does not contain all of the world's bioinformatics resources at this time. We have selected resources that meet certain standards of demand, utility and project robustness to begin. We anticipate expanding our list of resources over time.

A quick sample of a search for the word "domain" is illustrated here:

You can search with the plain text search with default settings, which will assume there is an AND between any words. For example: genome browser becomes genome AND browser in the search mechanism. You may also use the Boolean operators OR and NOT.

You can force a phrase search with quotes, such as "converting genome coordinates" to find those words in that order.

You can also browse the whole collection as a list or grouped by categories.

You can use the "Recent Queries" and "Favorite Queries" Menu navigation items to re-run previously performed queries.

By default our search mechanism will search our tutorials and associated descriptive information, our blog posts, and the documentation of sites that allow us to index content from those sites. We weight the training materials and our associated descriptive information, and the top page at the resource web, site most highly. This is combined with a measure of popularity of the web sites, the Google PageRank™ metric, in our combined relevance default search.

However, you may choose to focus only different aspects of our indexed material. Click the Advanced search options text beneath the basic search box to view the choices.

Default search = combined relevance of all aspects.

Choose Resource web page relevance to focus on the software provider's site information. However, we are unable to access pages at some sites, so this should not be considered a comprehensive search.

Choose OpenHelix training material relevance to focus on searches of our training materials collection. This will ensure resources that have OpenHelix tutorial suite materials collections are emphasized.

Choose Resource PageRank to use the Google PageRank™ feature to weight the results. Higher number PageRank suggests more popularity of the resource. However, some pages do not have page ranks and are listed as N/A and this may affect the outcome.

Select your search strategy and run queries as before. Your selected search strategy will be written near the top of your results list, such as: Results are sorted based on OpenHelix training material relevance.

Note: OpenHelix may not have access to complete documentation collections at outside sites. This may limit the results. We are not responsible for the maintenance or content of third party sites.