General Questions or Feedback

If you have general questions you would like answers for or would like to provide us with feedback on this site, please send an e-mail to:avshelp@aip.org

FTP Instructions

AVS Help On Searching

Browse Information
To browse an alphabetical company list, simply click on the button "Browse an Alphabetical Company Listing".

Important: Please be sure all of the search fields are empty before choosing this option. If you have already performed a search and hit your back button instead of using the navigation bar to go home, your search keywords will still appear in the fields. To quickly remove them, hit the "home" option in the navigation bar, this will clear all of the fields.

Search Information

You are presented with a search query box in which you may enter information pertaining to the following field:

Company Product Category
Choose a category from the drop-down menu and use the Search button to activate your query.

You may also search by:
Company Name
Company Location
Company Products and Services
Enter a keyword into any or all of the following fields and use the Search button to activate your query.

You may also search by both:
Product Category
and
Company Name
Company Location
Company Products and Services

Enter your selection into each field and use the Search Button to activate your query.

Use the Clear button to clear the search page of all text entries and start over with a new search.

Special Characters

Boolean and Proximity Operators [ Top ]

You can use operators and modifiers in query expressions to instruct the search engine to widen or narrow the focus of a search by applying logic to your query. The most popular logical terms are the operators AND, OR, and NOT. Modifiers can be used with operators to further define your question. These frequently-used words (AND, OR, and NOT) are interpreted as Verity Query Language by default.

You can focus the search more closely by telling the search engine to retrieve documents that contain the search terms in close proximity to each other: that is, near each other or in a specified order. The operators used for proximity searching are NEAR, NEAR/x, and the pair ORDER NEAR.

Wildcard Characters [ Top ]

Selects documents that contain matches to a character string containing variables. Wildcard characters let you define a search string with variables, which can be used to locate related word matches in documents. You can use the following wildcard characters to represent variable portions of search strings.