Browsing and Searching Discogs

Browse

Discogs is organized around artists, labels, and releases.

• An artist page lists all of the releases from that artist
• A label page lists all of the releases from that label
• A release page lists details of that release (year of release, tracklisting, etc).

You can browse a list of all artists or labels by the letter that they begin with. For example, all artists beginning with "A". Go to the home page and under the "Browse" section, click the letter of the artist or label you want to browse by.

Unicode

Discogs allows and encourages the correct use of Unicode characters for data entry. Sometimes, your computer or browser will not be able to display these characters unless you have set up your computer to do so. For those that can't see some of the Unicode characters, this article describes what to do for most browsers and operating systems.

Search

The search option is located in the upper left hand part of every Discogs page. Simply enter the word(s) you would like to search for and click Search. This will search all releases, artists, and labels. There is also a drop down which you can use to restrict your search to releases, artists, or labels only.

If there is an artist or label which matches your search query exactly, it will be listed at the top under "Exact Matches".

If the search returns only one result you will be automatically redirected to that page.

NOTE: The search engine cannot find single character words. Single character words are ignored, so searching for "A-Sides" is essentially the same as searching for "Sides".

NOTE: The Discogs search engine is updated once per day so new additions will not appear in the search results immediately.

Search Options

You can add various options to your searches to get more precise results. Examples:

* Phrase Search - "one two" - will find all pages with "one" and "two" next to each other.

* Boolean Search - one AND two - will find all pages containing the words "one" and "two".

* force/restrict words - one -two - will find all pages containing "one" but without "two". one two +three - will find all pages containing three, and possibly containing one or two

Search within fields

You can add a field name to your query to restrict the search to certain release fields. format: "field:word". The following fields can be used: catno:, format:, artist:, label:, country:, track:, style:

Example Searches

Search	will find...
classics style:techno	all releases with artist, title or label containing "classics" and style of techno
delano style:"tech house"	all releases with artist, title or label containing "delano" and style of "tech house"
label:svek AND 1997	finds all releases with label Svek and containing the word 1997
artist:afx AND country:UK	finds all releases with artist afx and country UK
format:7 -country:US	find all releases with format containing 7 (7") and not released in the US
track:"high society"	find tracks with the phrase "high society"
artist:tricky AND style:downtempo	find all releases with artist tricky and having style downtempo.

Search Shortcuts

The following shortcuts are available to quickly jump to a specific page:

Type	Syntax	Example	Will take you to...
Release	r:xxxx	r:1234	http://www.discogs.com/release/1234
User	u:xxxx	u:teo	http://www.discogs.com/user/teo
Change Request	c:xxxx	c:1234	http://www.discogs.com/subs/view1234