Welcome to DetectRight Search, the first released search with W3C Core Vocab compatibility: a big deal. We've tried to make the search as intelligent as possible, but here are some tips to maximize efficiency!

This search page is a device search, not a capability search, so terms like "mp3" would be pretty meaningless unless Nokia released the "Nokia N-MP3" :)

Issues?

Missing data in some of the W3C Core Vocab fields will be filled ASAP. Obviously data gathering is always ongoing...

What can I search on?

You can enter:

• manufacturers
• models
• user agents (or fragments of one)
• UAProfile URLs.
• Special search terms

How should I format the search?

Use quotes when necessary. It's easiest if you remember to use quotes ("") around search terms that contain spaces. A lot of work has been done to make sure that you still get sensible results if you forget the quotes, however.

Put a + in front of a search term to indicate it as compulsory. So Google^tm, so far ;-)

Special search terms can be entered using the format: "entitytype:model:version". For instance "platform:windows mobile:2003" or "browser:openwave:6.2". Search terms like this do an exact search on the database for entitytype and model (the version is inexact, or a "like '$version%' to be exact. The result you get from such a search is not the details of the entity in question, but those devices that are, according to our database, shipped with it. The concept of "platforms" is another more flexible way of dealing with shared inheritance of features. Making "platform" a bolt-on component for a device rather than a parent means that searches can be more flexible.

You can use "*" as a wildcard: e.g. *8000 will return all of the models in the database that are an "8000": i.e. LG8000, etc.

Enter a manufacturer name for best results: when a manufacturer is recognised, specific heuristics come into play to improve search results: e.g. the search phrase "Samsung U600" will return the correct result despite the U600 not being a valid device name (the valid one being "SGH-U600". This is the difference between consumer names for products and real names, and I've worked very hard to make it so that you always get what you want. It also means searches such as "Samsung U" will work to bring out all Samsung models of the Uxxx variety, whether they're SGH-, SCH-, SPH- or even MM-. Of course, if searchers routinely put "*" in (e.g. Samsung *U600, then I wouldn't have had to do that, but they don't.... so I did!

How does search link to membership status?

Only registered users get to access all pages of a search. Non-subscribers only have access to the W3C data in a search and a sampling of user agents and UAProf URLs: but it does tell you how much you'd get if you were a customer :)

Only subscribers get to download all the pages of a search in XML or XLS: everyone else just gets the first page.

Is registration free?

Registration is free: it gives you access to all pages of a search and access to an evaluation licence for the DetectRight API.

How do you know what a device is shipped with?

Believe me, it wasn't easy.

How many devices are in the data?

There are 9093 devices are in the main dataset: however, devices which have no data (except manufacturer and model, obviously!) are excluded from the search result dataset. In addition, there's always a process of data cleaning ongoing: for instance, attaching Smartphones to their AKAs to clear up the HTC/Dopod/O2/etc mess.

What's that WURFL comparison about?

In a vanilla WURFL installation, it's actually impossible to get a full list of manufacturer and model from the database: for the good reason that a large percentage of the manufacturer/model fields in WURFL are incorrect or missing (for instance, there are a large number of useragents that come out as Access Netfront for manufacturer/model. This leads to a situation where WURFL actually contains more manufacturer/model combinations than it thinks it does. The only way to get to the bottom of it was to identify each entry in WURFL with an entity in DetectRight, and build a composite table. Then a comparison can be easily done on the search results to build a profile of WURFL completeness. Why bother? Community information! There are other databases which will be compared too in the near future.