Reference desk / FAQ
Questions before you trust the part relationship.
Practical guidance for identifying industrial parts, reading evidence, handling uncertainty and choosing the right workflow.
What can I use Kernspoke to identify?
Published records in the supported families. Enter a manufacturer and part number and the lookup resolves it to a canonical record, or tells you it is not in the published catalogue. It does not identify parts outside current coverage.
What do the different lookup results mean?
An exact identity match resolves your input directly to a record. An alias match resolves through a documented alternative identifier. Candidates mean no exact identity was found and similar records are offered for you to choose between, which is not the same as a match. Not found is a statement about the coverage of this catalogue, not about the part.
What if a reference is obsolete or malformed?
Normalisation here is deliberately conservative: case and spacing are treated as noise, but a suffix, hyphen, colour code or decimal separator is not. Those can be the only thing separating two genuinely different parts, so they are never collapsed.
What evidence does a result show, and how should I read confidence?
Every material field carries the publisher, document, retrieval date and a locator saying where in the document it came from, plus whether the source states it explicitly or a reviewer inferred it. Confidence describes evidence strength and identity confidence. It is not a probability that a substitution is safe, and a higher score never grants interchangeability.
Does a documented cross-reference mean I can use the alternative?
No. It is evidence of the documented relationship only. Confirm electrical, mechanical and application requirements against the cited sources before substituting.
How do I report a correction or ask about a record?
See contact and corrections. A correction needs a source that a reviewer can check.
What is included in Free?
5 interactive lookups per UTC month. A small monthly allowance for occasional checks.
- Evidence, alternatives, caveats and buying paths when documented
- Verified public result pages remain quota-free
What is included in Independent?
25 interactive lookups per UTC month. For individual engineers, independent suppliers and smaller distributors.
- The complete core lookup and evidence trail
- Possible alternatives and cross-references with compatibility limits
- Verifiable buying paths when the reviewed source record provides one
What is included in Professional?
100 interactive lookups per UTC month. For teams turning part checks into repeatable, shareable research.
- Private projects and multi-line comparisons
- Evidence provenance, reports and printable views
- CSV export, API access and bulk CSV/BOM lookup
- Shared workspaces and team membership
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