1. Use at least two or three search terms. By using more search terms to narrow your search, you can locate documents that fit your information needs better.

Search Terms	Number of Hits
Gestapo	708
Gestapo and Nazi	405
Gestapo and Nazi and NSDAP	45
Gestapo and Nazi and NSDAP and escape	27

2. Be specific. When looking for documents about the Warsaw Ghetto, enter both of those words in your search query. If you enter just ghetto, your search may give you items concerning various ghettos.
3. Consider Language. The majority of the collection is presented in German, with some French and Dutch, in order to retrieve all relevant material you should enter your search term in a variety of languages, for example, Warsaw Ghetto and Warschau Getto.
4. Find an exact phrase with the help of the PRE operator. You can narrow your searches by requiring that the search terms appear as a phrase in the order that you typed them. For example, when looking for works that discuss anti-Nazi resistance, search for these words as a phrase, anti-Nazi PRE/2 resistance. It literally means find anti-Nazi "preceding within 2 characters or character spaces of" resistance. This narrows the results from hundreds of matches to a few dozen matches, assuming the phrase typed is not too common.
5. Mix phrases and single search terms in the search box. For example, enter "anti-Nazi resistance" AND German.
6. Broaden your search by using the OR operator. For example, "Ghetto OR Getto". Unless you tell the search engine otherwise, it finds only those works containing all of the words specified. By using OR between search words, terms, or phrases, you’ll find works that contain as few as one of the requested words. Using the OR operator will increase the number of results that are found; use OR if the search isn’t finding enough works.
7. Use plural or other word endings. For example, when looking for information on Jews, search for various forms of the word using the OR operator as the connector, e.g. Jew or Jews or Jewish. It is also possible, depending on the desired search term, to use the truncation (or wildcard) feature to retrieve multiple forms of a word, e.g., Jew*.
8. Try using synonyms for your original words. For example, enter "concentration camps" or "extermination camps".
9. Check your spelling. If you type resisance instead of resistance, your search won’t find any matches, unless you have activated some level of fuzzy searching.

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Capitalization

The search engine is not case sensitive. That is, use of capitalization does not affect the results of a search.

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Punctuation

Hyphen. A hyphen (-) used between two words is considered part of the term. When searching for a word or phrase that normally contains a hyphen, include the hyphen:

• "anti-Nazi"

Ampersand. Ampersands (&) are not recognized by the search engine. Use the W (Within) proximity operator. (See Search Operators below to learn more about proximity operators.)

• SS W/2 Gestapo (means "SS within two words of Gestapo"; instead of SS & Gestapo)

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Diacritics

Testaments to the Holocaust supports searching on and display of diacritics--letters that include phonetic markings, e.g., á, ô, ü, etc.--and special characters such as Æ and ø, which often occur in foreign-language terms and names.

Searching on a term that includes a diacritic, such as "Düsseldorf", will return results matching both "Düsseldorf" and "Dusseldorf". Likewise, a search on "Dusseldorf" will return results matching both "Dusseldorf" and "Düsseldorf".

Diacritics can be included in a search term or phrase by either copying and pasting a term containing a diacritic into the search term box, or by typing the diacritic using special combinations of keys on a standard keyboard. A useful document that provides information on using a standard keyboard to produce diacritics and other special characters, Typing Accents and Special Characters, is available online from Pennsylvania State University.

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Truncation (Wildcard) Characters

The * (asterisk) and ? (question mark) and ! (exclamation point) are used to search for words or numbers sharing a similar pattern. 

The * and ? and ! replace alphabetical and numerical characters.

The * (standing for any number of characters) is placed at the end of the term’s root. The search retrieves all words sharing the same root. For example, the term Jew* retrieves items that contain the words Jew, Jews, or Jewish.

The ? is used to replace exactly one character within a word to retrieve various forms of that word. For example, the term wom?n retrieves works that contain either woman or women; and wo??n matches women, woman or woven.

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Date Ranges

A date range is used to search for multiple years in date fields.

• 1943-1945 (to search for any year from 1943 through 1945)

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Search Operators

The Boolean search operators AND, OR, NOT, and proximity operators may be used to refine your search. Whether the operators are typed in uppercase or lowercase does not affect the search. Please note, however, that if an operator appears in a string of words you are searching for, such as Concentration and Extermination Camps, it will still be interpreted as a search operator. This may lead to irrelevant results. If you are searching for a string that contains a search operator, enclose the string in quotation marks.

AND. Use the AND search operator to retrieve documents that contain both of the specified search terms. This operator places no condition on where the terms are found in relation to one another; however, both terms have to appear somewhere in the field you are searching. For example, a full text search for November AND Pogrom will find any document that contains mention both of November and pogroms.

OR. Use the OR search operator to retrieve documents that contain one or both specified search terms. This operator places no condition on where the terms are found in relation to one another; however, one or both terms must appear somewhere in the field you are searching. For example, a full text search for November OR Pogrom will find documents that mention Novebber, documents that mention Pogrom, and documents that mention both.

NOT. Use the NOT search operator to retrieve documents that do not contain the specified term. For example, a full text search for November NOT Pogrom will find items that mention November but not Pogrom.

PARENTHESES. The operators described above each operate on either simple terms (words or phrases) or a more complex query delimited by parentheses ( ). Parentheses allow you to construct very powerful queries. For example:

• "November Pogrom" AND ((Jew and Gestapo) OR Jewish)

Boolean operators are applied in the order in which they appear. Therefore, the following searches are equivalent:

• November AND Pogrom OR Gestapo

• (November AND Pogrom) OR Gestapo

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Proximity

The proximity operators PRE (Preceding) and W (within) may be used to refine your search:

• The PRE operator will find documents containing the specified words in the specified order within the number of characters you indicate. For example, November pre/4 Pogrom finds documents that contain the word November preceding the word Pogrom within four characters or character spaces. This function can be vital in returning accurate results from typed or handwritten documents, which can often present irregularities of character spacing.

• The W operator will find documents containing the specified words in any order within the number of words you indicate. For example, November w/4 Pogrom finds documents that contain the word November within four words of the word Pogrom, regardless of their order (that is, Pogrom could precede or follow November).

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Field Length

The length of any given field is not limited to the window you see on the screen. As a search term or terms is keyed, the text will continue to scroll to the left, so that you can see the search expression as it is being keyed.

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Stopwords

Because the search engine does not recognize stopwords, search terms must be included in quotes or you can drop the stopword from the title or phrase.

For example, when searching for a string containing the word "of":

• Enclose the phrase in quotations marks. The search will work on the exact phrase (example: "Persecution of Jews").

• Omit the word "of" from the search (example: Persecution of Jews would be entered as Persecution Jews).

Stopwords include the following: