In this article we introduce a text search algorithm designed for ancient manuscripts. Word-spotting is the best alternative to word recognition on this type of document. Our method is based on differential features that are compared using a cohesive elastic matching method, based on zones of interest in order to match only the informative parts of the words. Thus we improved both the accuracy and the runtime of the word11spotting process. The proposed method is tested on medieval manuscripts of Latin and Semitic alphabets as well as on more recent manuscripts.