The BibTeX database search provided by these pages uses a gateway to the biblook program by Jeff Erickson. This program permits rapid lookup in a BibTeX bibliography database, using a compact binary index file. Each word is a contiguous sequence of letters and digits. Single characters and a few common words are also ignored.
Any word ending with an asterisk is treated as a prefix.
Here are the original manual pages for bibindex and biblook . Note that you cannot access the command level of biblook yourself, this is done by the gateway for you.