Why is drawing a structure better than searching by text?
1. Unnamed Molecules: The vast majority of available molecules have no name. Drawing allows you to search over 5 million structures, while text can search only a small fraction of that number. 2. Substructures: Drawing allows you the option of searching by substructure, i.e., the scaffold that underlies countless similar molecules. 3. Accuracy: A structure is a structure, unique and independent of any system of names or notation. In text searches, even for a named molecule, many things can go wrong. See Why Didn’t My Text Search Find Anything?
