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Expert Mode
Expert mode presents you with what is possibly the most ridiculous degree of control you're ever likely to see from a search engine of this nature. It's great for megalomaniacs everywhere! The key theme for this mode is "finer control". You can specify an Aminet mirror to link results to (albeit only when displaying results as a web page), sort the results in a variety of ways, match directories down to the second level in the tree, and basically match not only the kitchen sink, but the bathroom, bedroom, and garage in to the bargain!

Like Intermediate mode, Expert mode provides an extra layer of flexibility. It is possible to omit any word searching completely and merely match entries in given directories. Therefore, you could perform a search based simply upon the contents of the "demo" directory. Of course, the search options described below still apply under these circumstances. You can select one or more directories, if you wish. By default, all are searched. If these are used in combination with search words, results are restricted to those directories. Expert mode gives you far more control over the end result than Intermediate mode does. Instead of just displaying the top level directories, Expert mode shows the second level directories as well. Excluding directories in Intermediate mode was more implicit (ie. select all directories except the ones you wanted to omit) and coarser than it is here. Each top level directory has it's own multi-select box and you may select any or all of the options within. You can select "All" as a quick switch for activating the entire directory, or "None" to skip that entire tree. Note that the selection of conflicting combinations of directory options will be detected and filtered accordingly as there's no sensible reason why you would select "All" inside "biz" and also select "biz/demo". In this case, "All" will override "biz/demo".

The search words can be combined in a number of ways in order to make your search as specific as possible. Like most commercial search engines, there is support for Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT. If you prefer to just enter a series of search words separated by spaces, they are implicitly combined with AND. Phrase matching is also supported. While it should be noted that this is only really of use for searching descriptions, it is useful for finding groups of words close together. Simply enclose the words inside double quotes (") and they will be treated as one.

There are a number of checkboxes which allow you to tweak the actual text searching a little further. You can force the searches to be case sensitive by checking "Case sensitive", restrict text searches so that filenames (without extensions like ".lha", ".txt", or ".dms") can be searched or omitted by checking and unchecking the "Search filename" box respectively. You can allow the extension to be searched as part of the filename by checking "Search extension", but be warned that searching for "lha" on these occasions isn't completely sensible! Finally, checking "Search description" will enable text searches through the short.

By default, the search words can be located anywhere inside the file name or description. While this is fine for most searches, the so-called "contains" option (selected from the box immediately left of the search word text box) isn't appropriate for searching for very short words which may appear inside larger ones (eg. "fun" will match "fundamental"). There are alternative options which might make more sense on certain occasions. Using "starts with" will only match the search words against the beginning (left-hand side) of the file name and/or description. In the same way, "ends with" will match the search words against the end (right-hand side) of the file name and/or description. "contains word" will match search words with whole words in the file name and/or description. This means if you search for "cat", you'll get just that, and not "catapult" as you'd get with "contains" or "starts with". Using this with phrase matching means that while a search with "contains" will match "so it be" against "also it begins" "contains word" will not. The last option is "sounds like". As the name implies, this searches for individual words inside the file name and/or description which match search words that sound the same.

Bear in mind that certain combinations of Boolean operators and search options are not necessarily that useful. For example, using a "starts with" or "ends with" search upon only a file name or description with an AND operator will not add anything to a search of cat and catalog, and will not return any results for cat and dog. Incontrovertibly, there are other combinations like this. The only word of advice is to consider carefully how to express your search parameters.

You can also specify the ages of the files you're looking for by entering numbers in to the appropriate boxes to the right of "Is aged between". Simply enter a number which specifies the number of days since the file was uploaded. You do not have to enter a number in both boxes, so you can leave either the lower or upper limit boxes empty if you only wish to cut off one end of the results.

In a similar fashion to limiting the ages of files in the results, you can do the same for the sizes. Just specify a size in kilobytes (K) to ensure that results are no lower or no higher than the values you supply. Again, it is possible to omit numbers in one of the two boxes if you only wish to limit sizes at a particular end of the scale. You may also set the exact size you're looking for down to the nearest byte, if you wish. There are select boxes beside each size box which allow you to define whether that particular value is in bytes, kilobytes (1024 bytes), or megabytes (1024 kilobytes).

There are three radio buttons which enable you to present the results in a number of forms. The default method is to display them in a web page. A select box is provided to the right of this radio button to allow you to set the number of results displayed per page. Results may also be E-Mailed as a plain text file (of a similar to Aminet mailing list updates) to an address specified by the text box to the right of the radio button. Finally, a plain text file of the results can be downloaded immediately from your browser. If you are displaying the results as a web page, you might have a particular preference of Aminet mirror for downloading your files from. If so, there's a select box to the right of the corresponding radio button for you to make that selection. However, bear in mind that the listing shows all Aminet mirrors, both full and partial. As there is no way of ascertaining which Aminet mirrors carry which files, you should be prepared for the possibility of certain mirrors not carrying the files you request. In short, if you find that the file you click on from the results page doesn't exist, then you'll simply have to use an alternative mirror!

In any of the above cases, you may choose to sort the results list. As you might expect, it is possible to sort by name, description, age, size, or directory. You can select whether this sorting happens in ascending (ie. A to Z) or descending (Z to A) order, bearing in mind that the sorting is always done case insensitively. In the event of there being a large number of results which prove difficult to distinguish effectively, you can apply a second level of sorting. The same options are available as before. In the absence of any sorting, the system defaults to the order in which they appear on Aminet (sorted by directory in ascending order, followed by file name in ascending order).

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