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There are several areas to be careful about when doing
web searching in any foreign language. Following are some ideas to help
anyone searching the web using the German language or German resources.
Accents (ümlaut) & special characters
 | If you will be typing accents infrequently or you do not wish to change
your keyboard:
 | Web Hold down alt and use the number pad, not the upper
row of numbers. When you release alt the accented letter appears.
 | alt + 132 = ä
alt + 142 =
Ä |
| alt + 148 = ö
alt
+ 153 = Ö |
| alt + 129 = ü
alt
+ 154 = Ü |
| alt + 225 =
ß
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| WORD ctl + shift + : (nothing
appears on the screen) + a, o, or u = ä,
ö, ü.
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| Disadvantage: you have to remember the numbers when
using the internet. |
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| If you will be using German a lot you can either:
| Set your computer to US
English International. This will not effect most of your regular
keyboard uses but a few less commonly keys are affected. Once you have
used it a few times, it should not cause any concern and is much simpler to
use since the same keys work in all documents.
| To set your computer |
- Open My Computer from the desktop
- Open the Control Panel and choose Keyboard/Input Locales
- Change Properties to United States International
- Click on O.K./Apply/O.K
| Once set, you use the quotation key before typing any accented letter.
Nothing appears on the screen until the actual letter is typed.
The quotation mark does not appear unless you hit the space bar.
" + a, o, u,
A, O, U = ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü
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| Disadvantage: you have to hit the space bar after using the
specific mark ("). The apostrophe is also an accent marker,
so this could become annoying.
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| Set the keyboard to German language characters.
Click here for instructions from Microsoft. |
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Search Engines
| Read the general page on Web searching for a
detailed comparison of search results from English Language based search engines
and their foreign language versions.
| If you don't want to use the ümlaut, type ae, Ae, oe, Oe, ue, Ue to find both the
umlaut and non-ümlaut letter (this also works in the library catalog). Most search engines recognize the
Unicode eqivalents and automatically search for both.
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| German
| German search engines do not recognize a word that should have an
ümlaut. It is assumed that the user will use the German alphabet, so
not using the ümlaut results in an ineffective search. |
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Databases
| Some databases recognize the international ümlaut substitute, ae, oe, ue, others do
not. Test any new site.
| Lexis-Nexis [ue] you must use substitutes. does not recognize the
umlaut, nor letter without umlaut. |
| Silver Platter databases [u]- MLA, Sport Discus, etc does not
recognize the ü or ue |
| OPAC [u or ü] but not ue |
| Ingenta [u or ü] but not ue |
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Web sites
| http://home.att.net/~wee-monster/places.html |
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