About the page "Hints for Using OEIS"

[Giovanni Resta]

I apologize if this has been already observed.
I think that in the page
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/hints.html
(Hints for Using On-Line Encyclopedia ...)

there is a little  imprecision. It states:
"Simple search terms will be matched against every field of the entry"
but it seems to me that this is not the behavior of the search engine.

For example, if you compare two searches, namely

906180359
(  <http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/?q=906180359>  )

comment:906180359
( <http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/?q=comment%3A906180359> )

you'll obtain 1 match for the first and 3 matches for the latter.
So it seems that by default the search engine (contrary to what stated
in the
hint page) does not search all the fields.

Similar result can be obtained for other fields, like formula: or
mathematica: .

However  note that  the two searches
RamanujanTau and mathematica:RamanujanTau
both find the same 8 matches, so it seems to
me that if the  query contains no numbers then
it is matched against every field, but
if it contains one or more numbers then the numbers
are matched only (so it seems) against the numerical data
of the sequences.

So, for example, the search for
Polya 1987
does not find anything, because of that 1987,
and one has to resort to ref:Polya ref:1987

I think that this behavior, which is not exactly intuitive,
should be stated in the hint page.

giovanni.