# Quick Search Quick Search is the main way of accessing material information in Total Materia. Quick Search offers numerous benefits for users seeking material information. Its simplicity ensures that users can quickly input minimal information—just the material designation—and receive comprehensive results, making it a highly efficient tool. Additionally, understanding how Quick Search works allows users to fully leverage its capabilities, ensuring that they obtain the most relevant and accurate material data swiftly. This efficiency saves time and effort, enabling users to focus on their core tasks with the necessary material information readily at hand. ### Make your first Quick Search Making a Quick Search is as simple as entering the material **Designation** (e.g. *S235JR, 1.4404 or Makrolon 2405*) and clicking on the Search button.
The list of results will then be presented to you in an organized format (see [Results and Material lists](/search-tools/results-and-material-lists.md) for more details) ### Do More with Quick Search Quick Search does not only allow you to search by designation but also permits you to add common criteria to narrow down the results: * **Material Group**: Is your material a Magnetic Steel, an Aluminum, or a Polyamide (PA)? Use this dropdown to add some more criteria to make sure that you find what you are looking for * **Standard**: Is your designation standardized by SAE, ASME, or a German DIN material? Add here this information to remove any confusion in the results * **Producer**: Or is your material a proprietary grade from BASF or Arcelor Mittal? ### Q\&A #### My results have nothing to do with what I was looking for ! Although rare such cases are typically caused by: * An incorrect Designation: make sure that only the material designation is entered in the given field. It is common that engineers attach the standard, heat treatment or surface finish to the designation. Remove these terms and relaunch the search * The Designation is too specific: some polymer grades have a color code attached to the end of the designation at delivery. In such cases, remove the last letters or digits from your designation and search again. * The search terms are incompatible: If you use a EN designation (e.g AW 6061) but specify the search to be done in GB (China) standard, the search will present you the materials most similar in designation i.e. EN material but no GB material will presented. In order to find a GB material similar to the EN AW 6061, try rather to go through the Cross Reference tables available on EN AW 6061 (see [Find Equivalent Materials](/material-pages/find-equivalent-materials.md)) #### I have a set of criteria or properties, can I use Quick Search to find compatible materials? Quick search is mainly meant to find material by designation, not by properties for this purpose use [Advanced Search](/search-tools/advanced-search.md) #### I have entered a Designation and the name of my supplier and I get no results Your supplier might not be the producer of the material, you can search for him using our [Suppliers](/search-tools/suppliers.md) Your supplier might also be supplying you a material according to the specifications defined in a standard. In this case, to access the material details, search simply the material Designation without any term in the producer field. #### How does this search work? Quick search functions by initially matching the entered designation and subsequently filtering the results using other specified fields. When a designation is only partially entered, the matching process occurs from left to right, meaning that materials will be presented only if the partial designation corresponds to the beginning of a "word." For instance, if you search for "EN AW-6061," you can find it by entering "AW 6061." However, if you only enter "6061," this specific material will not appear in the results because there are other materials that align more closely with the search criteria such as 6061 from SAE. Therefore, to ensure optimal and accurate search results, it is recommended to enter the most precise and complete designation available. Spaces are recommended, but they are treated as wildcards. Unlike Google search, quotation marks "", plus +, and dash/minus - are not recognized and are ignored by the search engine Quick search assists in finding materials from a specific producer by providing a dedicated field where you can enter the producer's name. When you input the producer's name, the search mechanism filters the results to display materials exclusively supplied by that producer. This is particularly useful when dealing with materials that conform to specific standards or when you have multiple suppliers for similar materials. To achieve the best results, it is recommended to input the most precise and complete material designation alongside the producer's name, which ensures that the search engine can match and present the correct materials accurately. This approach streamlines the identification process and helps in quickly locating the exact material from the desired producer. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.totalmateria.com/search-tools/quick-search.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.