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Advanced Search is somewhat experimental and has some known bugs and limitations:
- The default ordering of the search results sorts according to series name and issue date. This ordering is not very useful if you search for publishers, you might want to change it under "Ordering".
- All "contains" searches match exact substrings. Punctuation is not ignored. "Jack Kirby; Joe Simon" and "Joe Simon; Jack Kirby" are two different searches.
- There's no way to search for multiple values in a field (for instance, while you can search for stories written or penciled by someone, you cannot search for stories penciled by either Jack Kirby or Joe Simon.
- Searching by date is somewhat tricky. Supported formats include "year.month.day", "year-month-day", "month/day/year", "month-name day, year", "day month-name, year" and just plain year.
- You cannot use 00 for month or day since that is not a date. Instead use the last day of the preceding year/month, e.g. 1989.12.31 to 1990.12.31 will find all comics we have recorded with a publication date in 1990.
- Date searching for series and stories uses a hidden field that is not always filled out. This is the same field used for sorting by date, which is why sometimes several out-of-sequence results will appear at the beginning of the list. It is also possible to search an issue's cover date as a text field without any conversion to an actual date.
- Many older indexes do not list the feature characters under characters as well. Therefore the standard search for characters (using the search box on top of the pages) returns matches in either the feature or the characters field. This search behaviour is not supported by the advanced search for technical reasons. You can somewhat simulate it by using the "OR some fields" option.
- Note that since there is no direct relation between publisher brands and indicia publishers, you cannot use the brand fields while searching for indicia publishers, and you cannot use the indicia publisher fields while searching for publisher brands.
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