I don’t want to bore anyone, so I’ll keep it as short as possible. In some German-speaking countries the double “s” is written as “ß”. But not in all of them. “Süssigkeiten” or “Süßigkeiten”, both are correct, it’s equivalent.
But unfortunately DT does not equate the two spellings in the search. “ss” does not find “ß” and vice versa. That’s a problem!
Could the DT developers consider equating these characters in the search? I am sure that other German-speaking users would also appreciate this. Thank you very much. 
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No promises but the request is noted.
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In my mind, that’s a difficult thing. ß is a not the same as ss, at least in Germany and in Austria. And the spelling rules are quite clear. If I’m looking for “Buße” (atonement), I don’t want “Busse” (busses) to be found. Same for Maße/Masse, Mus/muß, and there are probably other cases where the words have completely different meaning depending on their spelling.
However, there are cases were the spelling changed in the 1990s, like daß => dass, and there’s Switzerland which doesn’t have ß at all.
So perhaps an option permitting to treat ss as equivalent to ß in searches is a better choice than treating them as the same all the time.
That would be perfect! 
About the rest … that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid. A discussion about right and wrong. It’s simply a decision that different countries have made differently.
What is certain, however, is that it is really important to find what you are searching for.
I was not even remotely talking about “right” or “wrong”. But if I search for “Busse”, that’s what I expect to find. Not “Buße”, which is something else entirely. If the program is running in a DE_ch locale, it could treat ß as equivalent to ss. But even than, that seems like too harsh a default – it all depends on the documents in the database. If a Swiss person works with German or Austrian documents, they might well want to retain the difference. And vice versa: if I were dealing with Swiss documents, I’d want ß to be treated as equivalent to ss.
There’s nothing right or wrong in that, it’s a matter of preferences and requirements.
I thought enabling fuzzy searching may accomplish this, but no dice. Criss would have to assess the feasibility.
DEVONthink does this not contain any language-specific code or dictionaries, the fuzzy search might or might find the different spellings depending on the word’s length but also many other similar words and therefore isn’t really suitable in this case.
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