Search help for wien.at

Search options

The advanced search form offers three options for your query:

with all of these words
with at least one of these words
without these words

If you select "phonetic search", your query is converted into phonetic symbols. The search engine then searches for words that sound identical or similar. If you select this option, the search would find for example both "lessen" and "lesson" or "principle" and "principal".

Search rules

You can search for one or more words. Words must be separated by spaces.
The first search option ("with all of these words") will find pages that contain all of the search terms you type in.
The second search option ("with at least one of these words") will find pages that contain at least one of the search terms you type in.
The third search option ("without these words") excludes pages that include any of the words entered in this field. This option can only be used in combination with at least one of the other two search options.
You can use the search options "with all of these words" and "with at least one of these words" ("without these words") at the same time.
wien.at performs an exact search, i.e. it searches words you typed exactly as they are typed. For example the query "councillo” will yield no results, while "councillor” for example will.
- You can use the wildcard character * (asterisk) to find all words beginning with the characters preceding the wildcard. The wildcard * can replace one or more characters, but the first character of a search term cannot be a wildcard. e.g. "counc*" will find all results containing the words "council" or "councillor" and "data*" will find "database" and "data".
- You can use ? (question mark) as a wildcard for exactly one character. For example "M?ier" would find results containing the names "Meier" and "Maier".
The search is not case sensitive, i.e. it will find the same results regardless of whether the search term is in upper case, lower case or a mix of both.
Articles, numerals and other filler words yield no results, as well as common words that occur on nearly every page, for example "a", "that", "he", "eight", "8", "so", "under", "for", "if".
The search is currently limited to HTML files (PDF files, Word documents etc. are not yet included).

Search in further data sources

By ticking the respective checkbox in the "Search" field , you can select supplementary data sources to the wien.at pages.
Search results from these sources will be displayed in a separate list.

Social Information database: Searches the social welfare database of SozialinfoWien (Vienna Social Information)

To provide better and faster access to the search results, the first search result will be displayed automatically.

Keyboard navigation

As on all other wien.at pages, there are labels to jump directly to individual sections of the page such as "contents" or "navigation".

The search result pages also include additional labels to jump directly to "results" and "database results" and facilitate navigation for keyboard users and people using screen reading software such as screenreader.

Grouping

In order to give you a better overview of the search results, they are grouped by similar pages. The first hit in a category is displayed normally and up to tree further results are displayed slightly indented beneath that result.

If a category has more than 4 results, you can click on "More results in this category" to show all the results in the category.

Similar pages are pages that are in the same directory on the web server and therefore have related topics.

Each database can be added as rss-feed, depicted by the symbol next to the main title.