What does the search engine search in?

The search engine searches through the Hans Christian Andersen Centre's tales concordance, that describes and quotes occurrences of motifs in Andersen's fairy tales and stories. The concordance thus consists of a list of motifs and their occurrences in tales.

The search engine searches through both motif descriptions (name, description and keywords of the motifs) and the numerous quotations (text, keywords and commentary).

Truncation and masking

Truncation: A search can be widened to include variations of a word by adding * or ? at the start or the end of the word:

Masking: Masking substitutes unknown letters inside words:

Refine the Search

There are several ways to refine the search:
  1. "All the words" means that results must contain all of the words in the input.
  2. "Some of the words" means that the result must contain at least one of the words in the input.
    This method is right, if you for example want to find either "mermaid" or "dryad". The method is, however, not recommendable, if the input contains very frequently used words, for example "little", "old" or "the". It will return too many irrelevant results.
  3. "Whole sentence" means that all the words in the given order must be in the results.
  4. "Whole words only" means that the word(s) in the input must stand alone and not just be part of a word in the results.
    In some cases, e.g. searching for 'sin' this is a good idea, because you otherwise will find and have irrelevant words marked up, because the search phrase is a part of them.
  5. "Case-sensitive": Small or block letters make a difference.
    This gives a quicker search. If you are in doubt about when to use upper- or lower-case, choosing this option is a bad idea.

Danish vowels (æ, ø and å)

If the vowels æ, ø and å are not present on the keyboard, you may write '(ae)' instead of 'æ', '(oe)' instead of 'ø' and '(aa)' instead of å. Thus "H(oe)gh-Guldberg" equals "Høgh-Guldberg". This also applies to upper-case letters: '(AE)' for 'Æ' and so on. The two letters in the parenthesis must be either lower- or upper-case - one of each, like '(Oe)' for 'ø' or 'Ø', will not work.