# Home & Navbar Search

The most visible search function is the search field shown on the homepage and in the navigation header on any internal page.  This is intended to be a relatively “smart” and quick way to access data using a number of unique identifiers. The search logic is as follows: 

* If the search term returns a unique match for a protein name, alias or “slug” (name without special characters, and whitespace converted to single dashes), or if the search term matches one of the external accession IDs of a given protein, then the user is redirected to the protein page.
* If the search term matches a DOI, or unique family name of one of the authors in the database, then the user is redirected to the corresponding reference or author page, respectively. 
* If the search term matches the beginning of the scientific name of one of the organisms in the database (e.g. “*Aequorea*”), then the user is redirected to the corresponding organism page (in the case of multiple hits, the user is directed to the organism with more derived proteins in the database… a more specific search term may be used for less common organisms, such as “*Aequorea macrodactyla*” ).  
* Lastly, if the search query provides no unique hits following the aforementioned logic, then the user is redirected to the [advanced protein search](https://help.fpbase.org/searching/advanced-protein-search) page, which is prepopulated with proteins whose names are similar to the search term (based on PostgreSQL “trigram similarity”).