Text Search Technique

To search by material name, type the name of the material or a fragment of that material's name in the text box in the upper right of any page and click the "Search" button. MatWeb's Quick Search will return a list of all materials that contain the text you typed in their name. If the initial set of search results does not contain the materials that you are looking for, you can search deeper into the material notes by clicking the "Broaden Search" button. This option is especially useful to users who search for applications or descriptions of materials.

The Quick Search works best when you enter unique, unambiguous terms that are applicable to a small list of materials.  General terms like 'steel' or 'polyethylene' will yield thousands of results.

The Quick search code considers several different criteria to in response to your queries. The best matches are usually returned in the first set of results. Expanding the search will yield more results, but possibly with less relevance to the actual search terms.

Please note that punctuation and spacing matter - 'Aluminum 6061 T6' will be treated differently than 'Aluminum 6061-T6'.  Try to use the shortest unique phrase that you can, perhaps 6061 in this example.  We have tried to anticipate common permutations of names and we apologize if MatWeb doesn't recognize the nomenclature that you're using.

MatWeb does not recognize wildcard characters, such as '*' or '?'.  Instead, truncated terms entered without a wildcard character will still find complete words, although at a lower priority than a complete word match.  For example, typing 'alumin*' in the Quick Search in the hope of finding both alumina and aluminum yields zero results.  However, if you type 'alumin', you would find both "alumina" and "aluminum".

Additionally, MatWeb does not now support any type of quotation marks or parentheses to group terms.  Finally, please watch your spelling and remember that MatWeb uses common American spellings (i.e. fiber vs. fibre and aluminum vs. aluminium).

Live Example: Find Aluminum 2024.  Enter the phrase "2024" in the Search box (located in the navigation bar at the top of your browser window).  To perform the search, click the button labeled "Search".  An example search is shown below to help you locate the Search box.

The MatWeb Quick Search will only return materials whose names contain the exact text that you enter - in this case you will see entries for different heat treatments of Aluminum 2024 plus some plastics that have the text '2024' in their product number.  To see sample results, click the image below.