Enter the smallest amount of information necessary for your search. Even though there are a lot of fields on the query screen, enter information only in one or two of them at most. If you are looking for awards on Paph. Winston Churchill, don't enter the genus at all--Winston Churchill in the hybrid field will suffice. Better yet--use wildcards and only a portion of the hybrid name--see #2.

Don't forget the wildcard operators available in Wildcatt AQ queries. They are a double dot (..), signifying any sequence of characters including none, and an at sign (@), which signifies any single character. These can be extremely useful, both for finding awards when you are unsure of a spelling and for limiting the amount of information you must enter--reducing the chance of errors in your query. Here at Wildcatt Database Co. we rarely do an AQ query without including wildcards. Using wildcards is absolutely essential for finding awards for species with attached varietal names. In this case a double dot appended to the end of the species name will find names you would otherwise miss. If you leave off the double dot, Wildcatt will find only an exact match to what you typed.

Example of using Wildcards:

Typing hirsutisimum in the hybrid field of the AQ query results in a listing containing 0 awards ( I misspelled the species name).

Typing hirsutissimum in the hybrid field of the AQ query results in a listing of 33 awards for Paph. hirsutissimum.

Typing hirsutissimum.. in the hybrid field of the AQ query results in a listing of 49 awards including hirsutissimum var. album and hirsutissimum var esquirolei.

Typing ..hirsutissimum.. yields 50 awards-- the above 49 and and an additional award for Paph esquirolei (hort. syn. hirsutissimum).

Typing ..hirsuti.. yields 51 awards-- the above 50 and an additional award for Paph hirsutissimum var. esquirolei where hirsutissimum has a space inserted in the middle of the name(a typo).

In general use of wildcard operators and a minimum of typed information yields the most successful AQ searches, although it may take several searches by trial and error to get exactly what you want--if you make your criteria too general you may get more than what you are looking for--but it is easy to narrow down a general search. The same operators can be used in any fields, including exhibitor or description fields etc. to get the information you want.