Knowledge Article · NLM Customer Support Center

How do I reduce search load to avoid being penalized for heavy usage when teaching BLAST in a classroom?

When you are teaching BLAST^® in a physical classroom, all participating students conduct web searches from the same IP address. That can result in heavy usage from your IP address. BLAST’s monitoring system penalizes heavy usage from an IP address.
To reduce your search load, you can introduce the following strategies:

Share the results of your demonstrative searches with your students using the Request IDs (RIDs).
Optimize your searches:
- Use a smaller query or specify a query subrange.
- Target a smaller BLAST database.
- Use organism limit to target a smaller subset in the database.
- Select a larger word size.
- Lower the expect value.
- Decrease Max target sequences.
Share the optimized search strategies with your students using:
- bookmarked URL
- search-strategy file