The database is generally updated nightly, and on startup, bibsearch displays the date of the last update, plus some statistics on the size of the collection. It also gives some helpful hints about commonly-used commands. The collection includes about 80 journal-specific bibliographies, of which about 20 provide complete coverage of their respective journals. This may be handy if you want to find related bibliography entries serendipitously, without knowing exactly what they contain.
Searches always ignore letter case.
You may find that using .set mode hilite makes it easier to spot the matched strings in the output. With each BibTeX entry retrieved, bibsearch provides definitions of any BibTeX strings used in the entry. Acknowledgement strings are not included in this output, because they are often large, and because few, if any, BibTeX styles use them. You can find their definitions near the top of the original BibTeX file identified at the start of each search result.