New and improved HGNC search available on beta.genenames.org
HGNC, Search ·
Over the past few years we have collated user feedback about our current HGNC search. We have listened to suggestions on how we could improve the usability further, and are delighted to announce our new search application which can now be found on our HGNC beta site.
New features
One search to rule them all!
We found that users weren’t often using the “search type select” feature of our search; nearly all users were using the default “Search all”. Now there is one search for all document types within www.genenames.org. This all encompassing search also searches our blog.genenames.org site returning hits to our newsletters, announcements and articles.
Only having one search makes it easier to use, quicker to load the page, and has improved response times.
No need for wildcards
Many of you did not like having to use wildcards to search using root symbols like ZNF* to find all gene symbols beginning with ZNF. In our new search there is no need to use wildcards and simply using the root will successfully return all genes that begin with the queried root symbol.
Suggestions
The new search will give you suggestions as you type your query. If one of the suggestions is correct, clicking on it will bypass the search results page and will take you straight to where you want to be. The autosuggest feature will make suggestions on the following categories:
- Gene symbol (i.e approved gene symbols)
- Previous symbols
- Alias symbols
- Gene names
- Group names
- Page titles
The suggestion dropdown is scrollable and will display a maximum of 5 possible suggestions for each category. If there are more than 5 suggestions identified in a category, there will also be a line stating how many there are in total. This line is a clickable link and allows you to see all the possible suggestions displayed on the search page.
All English word variants accepted
All of our gene names use US English spelling, which can cause problems for those searching using British spelling. An example of this issue can be seen in the current search when using the word “signalling” as the query. In the new search, all variant spellings of a word are used to search, so either the UK spelling (e.g.”signalling”) or the US spelling (e.g. “signaling”) will bring back the required gene symbol reports.
Download search results
Users can now save the data returned from search queries by selecting the TXT file icon for a tab separated variable format file or the JSON icon for a JSON format download file. These icons can be found on the left hand side of the search results page underneath the filters. Select your file format and the javascript code within the page will send batch queries to the search server, returning all your results in one file. Please be aware that downloading large files may take some time.
You will still be able to create advanced queries using the lucene query language and information on how to write advanced queries can be found in our search help page.
Feedback
We would love to hear from you. Please tell us what you like or don’t like and/or offer suggestions on how we could improve the beta search. You can do this using the comments section below or using our feedback form.