The most important prerequisite when performing a search is to choose the appropriate language, in which you would like to search. Select the langauge in the header of the page. If you are performing a search for a German document, switch to German (DE). Correspondingly, switch to English (EN) or French (FR) when searching documents in these languages.

A query is broken up into terms and operators. There are two types of terms: single terms and phrases. A single term is a single word such as test or hello. A phrase is a group of words surrounded by quotation marks such as "nano technology". Phrases are searched as given. Multiple terms can be combined together with Boolean operators to form a more complex query (see below). For example, you may search for one or several single terms:

nano scale technology

This query will find all documents that contain all of the above single terms. Note, this is actually an implicit AND boolean operation as described below.

Enter the search terms or phrases into the search field in the header of the page and submit the search query by pressing Enter or clicking on the Search button.