General Search Tips

• If you are looking for a person (e.g. the author), limit your search to the last name. First names are not always found or only in abbreviated form.
• When searching for a title, enter 2-3 keywords. This is usually sufficient to limit the number of hits. The more words you enter, the smaller the number of hits, but the faster it can happen that you do not find the title you are looking for because the spelling is different.
• If you are not looking for a specific title, but for a topic, use the "simple search" or search fields such as "All Fields", "Free text", "Topic" or "Keyword".

Upper and lower case letters, special characters, umlauts

• Upper and lower case letters are of no significance for the search, both will always retrieve the same result.
• One-figure special characters such as the stress on é as in mathématique or the Å in Årsbok can simply be omitted.
• Umlauts (ä, ö, ü) and ß will be resolved and you retrieve results with ae, oe, ue and ss as well. If you enter erlaß you will get results containing the words both Erlass and Erlaß
• In some subject databases - especially those from English-speaking countries - the umlauts in the title of an essay, for example, are always converted into the basic form. This must then also be taken into account in the search.

Use placeholders

If you do not know the exact spelling of a word, use the question mark (?) or the asterisk (*) as a placeholder. The question mark replaces exactly one character, the asterisk replaces any number of characters.

• You search for: child*
  You will get results containing the words: Child, Children, Childhood, Childcare etc.
• You search for: wom?n
  You will get results containing the words: Woman or Women
• You search for: cat?
  You will get results containing the words: Cat or Cats (but not Cattle, because the ? just replaces one character)

Be careful not to place the placeholder too far at the beginning of the word or too far at the end. If you put in too far at the beginning, you will also find irrelevant results. If you put in too far at the end, you will exclude terms that are relevant to you.

Example: You are looking for terms on the subject “children”. If you search for chil*, you will also find titles on the subject of “Chile” or “Chilling”.

In some cases, other word forms or similar terms are automatically searched for during the search. The prerequisite for this is that the word and all other word forms are stored in a dictionary. This is often not the case for non-English terms. If you use a wildcard, the automatic search for other word forms or similar terms is switched off. It is therefore possible that you will find fewer hits if you set a wildcard than without a wildcard.

In some search services, wildcards cannot be used at all, or can only be used at the end of a word, or only the asterisk can be used and not the question mark. As a rule, you cannot use wildcards at the beginning of a word.

Fuzzy search / Similar search terms / Word forms / Automatic wildcards

Many search services - especially search engines like Google - use fuzzy search by default. When you enter a search term, "similar" search terms are also found by comparing them with dictionaries, other users' searches or by using AI. It automatically corrects spelling mistakes, adds wildcards, and looks for other word forms (plural, genitive, etc.).

Depending on the search service, fuzzy search can be turned off in different ways: Either by putting quotation marks around the words or a + in front of the word, or by selecting special search fields or ticking a checkbox ("exact search"). Fuzzy search services often do not allow you to use wildcards, or you accidentally turn off the automatic search for word forms by setting an asterisk, which will return even fewer hits than without wildcards.

Some search services allow you to specify that you also want to find similar search terms by typing a character in front or after a word. For example, in our library catalogue, if you enter house~ (the ~ at the end is a tilde), you will also find titles that contain the words houses or home in addition to the word house.

There are several ways to combine several search terms within one search field or terms in different search fields. Many databases offer the following options:

Find all terms (AND)

Use the word AND (in capitals), the plus sign or simply the space bar to get hits that contain all search terms.

• star AND trek
• star +trek
• star trek

If you use space bar, usually the hits will be displayed first where all search terms occur and then those that contain only some or one of the entered search terms.

Word groups (phrase search)

Use quotation marks to get only hits where the search terms appear directly next to each other (in a specific order).

• "star trek"
• "james t. kirk"

Find one or more terms (OR)

Use the word OR (in capitals) or the brackets (...) to get hits with either one or the other (or both) search terms.

• star OR stern
• (star stern)

Since the search range is greatly expanded with an OR operation, you will often find a large number of hits. Therefore it is useful to add another term to the search, which must occur (AND or phrase).

• film AND star OR stern
• film (star stern)

Note here whether and how a search engine combines the terms, because the search for film AND star OR stern could also be interpreted by a search engine as searching for the terms film and star or for the single term star.

Exclude terms (NOT)

Use the word NOT (in capitals) or the minus sign to get only hits that include the first search term but not the second.

• star NOT trek
• star -trek

Note that some search engines do not consider the word NOT as "exclude terms" and instead search for the German word "Not".

Please also note that you can use NOT to exclude pages that actually match your search query. A page with the title "This is about Star Wars not Star Trek" would still not be found with the search for star -trek because the word trek appears on the page.