The Hamburg/ESO survey for bright QSOs. II.

After digitisation, the extracted spectra were searched for quasar candidates in a largely automated two-stage procedure. Several selection criteria, such as UV excess or presence of emission lines, were applied simultaneously to the databases.

Thanks to the high spectral resolution of the spectra, the stellar contamination in the candidate sets could be efficiently kept low. Follow-up spectroscopy has yielded 160 newly discovered QSOs and Seyfert 1 galaxies, plus a variety of other interesting galactic and extragalactic objects. Although the present QSO sample is not statistically "complete" insofar as it has no well-defined flux limit, there is no evidence for strong redshift-dependent selection biases.