In consequence of the change in the nature of data management systems the requirements for search support have shifted. In the early days of data management systems, efficient access techniques and optimization strategies for exact match queries had been the main focus. Most of the problems in this field are satisfactorily solved today and new types of applications for data management systems have turned the focus of current research to content-based similarity queries and queries on distributed databases. The present contribution addresses these two aspects. In the first part, algorithms and data structures supporting similarity queries are presented together with considerations about their integration in data management systems, whereas search techniques for distributed data management systems and especially for peer-to-peer networks are discussed in the second part. Here, techniques for exact match queries and for similarity queries are addressed.