Documents and portal objects are indexed with a language setting that determines how word breaking and stemming are applied. When a user issues a search query, word breaking and stemming are applied according to the user account locale settings. Search results are best when the language used for the search matches the language of the documents being searched. However, searches are normally applied to documents in all languages. Cross-language searches do not benefit from localized stemming and word breaking, but can still return useful results.

When searching portal content via the Search box in the portal banner, the text of the query is processed using the language setting of the user interface. If the portal interface is German, the query is tokenized and stemmed using German language rules, providing optimal search results for documents indexed using German linguistic rules.

If the search collection contains documents in other languages, you can still retrieve them with a query using the appropriate text (assuming the user interface permits entry of the necessary characters). Typing English words into the search box of a portal using a German interface applies German linguistic rules to the query text. Because English stemming is not used, the query is not able to match alternate English word forms; however, English language documents containing the entered words are retrieved.

Although you can enter Asian language text into a European language search box (if a compatible character encoding is used), you should limit the text to a single word or manually separate words with white space to be able to match Asian content in the search collection.

The Advanced Search page provides additional functionality for searching in a multi-language document collection. A pop-up list allows the user to select the language to use for query processing. Linguistic rules for tokenizing and stemming the selected language are used when processing the query text. Among other things, this means that Asian text can be entered without unnecessary white space.

The query operators recognized by Simple Search and Advanced Search are sensitive to the language setting. For example, the AND operator can be specified as “UND” when the query is processed as German. Localized operators are available for the following languages: English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Portuguese, and Spanish. All other languages use English operators.