Multilingual search

Help Search & Find Multilingual search

A keyword search is perhaps the most intuitive and familiar of the ways to approach an online archive: it is like Google and other search engines. Indeed, we like to call Archives Portal Europe “the Google of Archives”. However, the way in which the Archives Portal Europe search engine works is much different from Google.

Once you have typed your set of keywords, the portal will look for those words across millions of archival descriptions. By default, the portal will look for documents containing all of the entered keywords, whether they are close to each other or not.

While Archives Portal Europe holds material in more than 20 languages, its search engine will only look for the keywords that you provide. However, there are two features that allow for multilinguality: spelling suggestions & wildcard characters. See our Research Tools section for more details on this.

You can also refine your searches according to the language filter, which will only show results in the language(s) of your choice. However, please note, the search engine does automatically recognise a language; the filter is only active for those collections that indicates the information on which language they are written in a machine-readable format.