Wikipitaka:Searching

Wikipedia search
Put your keyword in the searchbox.
 * Go - (or Enter on keyboard), will take you automatically to the article.
 * Search - will return a list of articles.

Effective searching
Here are few good tips and hints for using the Wikipedia search feature effectively:

Limiting results

 * Any word: Wikipedia's default search mode will turn up results with any of the words in your query. For instance, search engine turns up many results containing only "search" but not "engine" or only "engine" but not "search" in addition to the ones you probably wanted, which contain both words.
 * All words: To limit to results that include all words, put a "+" at the beginning of each word: +search +engine returns only pages containing both words, like Google's default mode. You can also do a phrase search by enclosing words in quotes: "search engine" turns up a smaller set of results, which not only have both words but have them in order.
 * Exclude words: To exclude results that include some words, put a "-" at the beginning: search -engine

Boolean search is also possible, using words including "AND", "OR", and "NOT".

Avoid short and common words
If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about") it may give a large number of non-relevant results. Historically, these words could not be searched at all, but as of February 2006, Wikipedia's Lucene index does not use "stop words", so any word can be successfully used in search queries.

Wildcards
You can use some limited wildcards if you really want to. Look up "fulltext search" on http://www.mysql.com/ and look down under 'boolean search' for the details. However, wildcard searches are slower, so go easy on the poor server.

Words with special characters
In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odili&euml;nberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "&amp;euml;". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odili&euml;nberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed -- the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent. See also Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Special characters.

Words in single quotes
If a word appears in an article with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in articles, for which this problem does not arise. See the manual of style for more info.

An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.

Namespaces searched by default
The search only applies to the namespaces selected in the user's preferences. To search the other namespaces check or uncheck the tickboxes in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page. Depending on the browser, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but without being effective any longer! To make sure, uncheck and recheck it.

Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image description pages.

Delay in updating the search index
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes are not always immediately taken into account in searches.

If you cannot find an appropriate page on Wikipedia
If there is no appropriate page on Wikipitaka, consider creating a page, since you can edit Wikipedia right now. Or consider adding what you were looking for to the Requested articles page.