Books Catalog

This page once ran call_books.pl, a CGI script that searched our manuals database for lab protocols. A request came in as a query string—?Search=Search&keyword=PCR and the like—and the Perl backend did exactly what you would expect for 2004: it opened a flat text file, read it line by line, and ran a case-insensitive regex against each record looking for the keyword. No index, no SQL, no caching. If you searched "PCR" you got every line that contained those three letters, including a few false hits we never bothered to clean up. It was slow and it was literal. But it ran for years, and people found their thermal-cycler manuals, which was the whole point.