“Frankfurt” appears in 46 tender titles. 434 tenders are in Frankfurt.

Type Frankfurt into a tender portal and you get the tenders whose title happens to contain the word: 46, in our open set today. The tenders whose buyer sits in Frankfurt, or whose work is to be performed there, number 434. Nine out of ten are invisible to a title search.

The title is the least informative field in a notice, and the one every search box reads first. Buyers name procedures the way their filing system does. A door-and-window contract at a theatre is “Los 1: Türen und Sanierung Fenster”; the same trade at a nursery is “LV 327.1 Tischlerarbeiten” — a bill-of-quantities number, no trade word at all. A search for Tür finds 57 open German tenders by the word. The CPV group for joinery and doors, which the notices carry whether or not the title says so, holds 812.

Three fields do the work the title refuses to do. The CPV code says what is being bought in a language-independent number; the buyer says who; theplace of performance says where. Across our open set, 79,230 of 96,050 tenders (82%) carry a city, and every one carries at least one CPV code. A search that reads those three fields, and treats a word like Frankfurt as a place rather than a string, turns the 46 into 434.

What we changed this week, in case you use our search: a word is looked up in the title, in the buyer, and in the place; a trade word also pulls in its CPV group when the data says the two go together (“Tür” and the joinery group appear together 25 times more often than chance); two words are combined with AND, so Tür Frankfurt means doors in Frankfurt, not doors orFrankfurt. And when a combination returns nothing, you see what each word alone would have found. The results are sorted by what you can still bid on and where competition was thin last time — not by whichever deadline is closest.