Search in stocks of data, particularly on optical media, is intended to be optimized in terms of the time required for the search. It is therefore proposed that the search be carried out in two steps. In a first search step, the entire database is scanned on the disk storage medium. In a second search step, executed in parallel, intermediate results from the first search step are searched. This allows the number of skips on a disk to be reduced, which results in increases of speed, particularly in the case of optical drives.