Help:Searching
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Wikipedia has a search engine built in, which can be used to locate material on Wikipedia. The search box is located at the top right on every page on the standard Wikipedia skin (Vector), or it is usually placed in the toolbox on the left hand side of the page in other skins. It will take you to the article that matches your query; otherwise it displays the search results. To display the full search results, click on the last item in drop-down list (which says "containing..."), or perform an empty search.
This basic search box does not search categories. You can display a more advanced special search interface by doing a null search (with nothing in the search box, click on the magnifying glass or the "Go" button). Click on "Advanced" for an even more advanced interface that allows you to search categories, etc.
You can also search directly from your web browser.
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Search results page
The default search only applies to the Mainspace, where articles are stored. When searching for articles, a box on the right of the search results page shows the most relevant results from our sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikisource and Wikibooks. Other types of content pages can be searched by selecting an option from the grey search types box below the search input box.
If Multimedia is selected, you can search images, videos and songs stored on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons. This option will search their file names and descriptions.
If Help and Project pages is selected, you can search the "Help" and "Wikipedia" namespaces. These namespaces contain help pages, Wikipedia guidelines and policies, and all pages used for administration and maintenance of the site. If you have a specific question about Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Questions for where to find answers.
If Everything is selected, you can search all namespaces.
To search in any subset of namespaces, click Advanced on the search form. A quicker way to search a single namespace is to type the namespace, a colon, then the search term in the search box, for example Wikipedia:Verifiability returns search results for verifiability in the Wikipedia namespace.
Registered users can modify the default namespace to search in "My Preferences". They can also choose how much context and how many hits per page to display when viewing search results. See Help:Preferences for more information.
Navigation pages will attempt to guide you to the correct article. You may encounter two types of these pages when searching for a topic.
- Disambiguation
- You may type in something like Plaque, that takes you to a list of the many things that you could mean by it. This type of page is called a disambiguation page, and it's there to make things easier for you. Such a page prevents you from having to guess the exact phrase used to identify each page.
- Redirection
- Some things can be referred to by many names. The Flag of the United States, for instance, could be called the American Flag, the US Flag, or many similar things. Searching is set up so that if you search for any of those terms, you will be "redirected" to the proper place. If instead of being redirected you are taken to a search menu, then you have searched for a phrase that has not been set up to redirect to an article. In such a case, you may look through the search results for an appropriate topic, try searching for an alternative spelling or name for the term, or try something related like Flag or USA. Once you have found what you were looking for, consider adding redirect pages for the expressions that you tried that did not lead to an article because chances are that you are not the only one thinking about the topic in this way. Thus, in doing so you will make life easier for those who later search for the term.
Search engine features
The internal search engine can search for parts of page titles or page title prefixes, and in specific categories and namespaces. It can also limit a search to pages with specific words in the title or located in specific categories or namespaces. It can handle parameters an order of magnitude more sophisticated than most external search engines, including user-specified words with variable endings and similar spellings. When presenting results, the internal search understands and will link to relevant sections of a page (although to a limited degree some other search engines may do this as well).
The internal search is also able to search all pages for project purposes, whereas external search engines cannot be used on any talk page, a large part of projectspace, and any page tagged as noindex.
The source text (as shown in the edit box) is searched for. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for interlanguage links (to find links to Chinese articles, search for zh, not for Zhongwen), special characters (if ê is coded as ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc. Entering an article title will jump to that article; to display a list of matches to the search term instead, prefixing the search term with "-" or "~" (see "Avoiding automatic direction to page" below) will force a full search.
Upper and lower case as well as some umlauts and accents are disregarded in search. For example, a search for citroen will find pages containing the word Citroën (c = C, e = ë). Some ligatures match the separate letters. For example, a search for aeroskobing will find pages containing Ærøskøbing (ae = Æ).
The following features can be used to refine searches:
- Phrases in double quotes – A phrase can be searched by enclosing it in double quotes. For example, "holly dolly" returns very few results as opposed to holly dolly (two standalone words).
- Boolean search – By default logical AND is applied to all search terms, just as on all major search engines. Parentheses and "OR" can also be used. For example windows OR system and combined: microsoft (windows OR system) (note the uppercase OR).
- Exclusion – Terms can be excluded with by preceding them with -, with no intervening space. For example payment card -"credit card" will find all articles with payment and card, but not "credit card". Similarly credit card -"credit card".
- Wildcard search – Wildcards (characters taking the place of any other character or string that is not known or specified) can be prefixed and suffixed, for example, the query "*stan" will produce articles like Kazakhstan and Afghanistan.
- Fuzzy search – Adding a tilde (~) at the end of a search matches words with similar spelling. For example, searching for james~ watt~ identifies James Watt, James Wyatt, and James Watts as the first three search results.
- Avoiding automatic direction to page – Adding a tilde (~) at the beginning of a search word forces a search for a word or phrase across Wikipedia rather than being directed or redirected automatically to an article or disambiguation page. For example, ~similiar will find pages with the misspelling, instead of being redirected to Similarity. ~"Credit card"/~Credit card will not invoke the "Credit card" article, but will list all articles containing the phrase "credit card"/the words "credit" and "card". In most cases this is equivalent to entering the search term without tilde, but clicking on the "containing" option instead of going to the article.
- intitle: – using the intitle: parameter, query results can be narrowed by title. The search word(s) given to intitle: can be anywhere in the title. Example searches using intitle:
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incategory: – using the incategory: parameter returns pages in a given category (as long as the pages are directly categorized, and not transcluded through templates). This feature doesn't return pages in subcategories. Note that, for category names that contain a space, either the space must be replaced with an underscore or the category name must be surrounded by double quotes for the search to be effective.
For more on using categories to find articles, see Wikipedia:FAQ/Categories. Example searches using incategory:
- prefix: – use the prefix: parameter to limit the results to article titles starting with the given characters. If a namespace is also given to prefix:, that page name will override any and all other namespace searches. Prefix: should be the last parameter in the query. See also, Special:PrefixIndex. Example searches using prefix:
- all: prefix allows for a quick search in all namespaces, while canonical namespaces prefixes allow for a quick search in particular namespace, for example template:wrong
- Stemming: searches are subject to stemming by default. In some cases, it can be deactivated by using double quotes. See the following example:
Using the search to directly get to a page
When using the search to directly get to a page, it doesn't matter whether you enter capitals or lower case letters (unless there are two article titles which differ only in capitalization). Umlauts and accents are also disregarded, but ligatures do not match the separate letters.
Specialized uses of the search to directly get to a page include the following:
- To navigate to a section of a page using anchor notation. For example, Poland#History.
- To navigate to a special page, including one with a parameter following a slash. For example, Special:Log/Example.
- To navigate directly to a page on another language Wikipedia or Wikimedia project, using the appropriate interwiki prefix; some other prefixes work too. For example, enter fr:France to go to the article "France" on French Wikipedia, or wikt:help to see the Wiktionary entry for the word "help".
- To go quickly to the user contributions of an IP address – just enter the address. For example, 123.45.56.89.
Specialist searches
Special:LinkSearch is a tool for searching for external links from Wikipedia pages to sites outside Wikipedia. For example, all Wikipedia pages linking to Yahoo.com.
External search engines – see Wikipedia:External search engines and Wikipedia:Tools#Searching
Other languages – for searching other language editions of Wikipedia see http://wikipedia.org/ and the links above.
Toolserver – there are multiple tools on Toolserver, most notably:
- Grep (alternative) — search pages titles using regular expressions.
- CatScan — powerful search using categories, included templates, etc.
- Wikimedia-Search
If you cannot find what you are looking for
If you're looking for a city in France but don't remember the right spelling of Bordeaux, go first to a similar entity, such as Paris. Find the next higher entity, such as the article on France or the Category:Cities in France, from where you can easily find Bordeaux.
For an overview of how to find and navigate Wikipedia content, see Portal:Contents. If you're looking for a straight definition of a word, try our sister project Wiktionary.
If there is no appropriate page on Wikipedia, consider creating a page, since you can edit Wikipedia right now. Or consider adding what you were looking for to the Requested articles page.
If you have a question, then see Where to ask questions, which is a list of departments where our volunteers answer questions, any question you can possibly imagine.
A common mistake that people make is typing a question into the search bar and expecting answers from that. The misconception here is that people forget that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with articles, and the search tool is only for helping find particular articles on a subject. They think that the search tool is like a search engine on the web, such as Google, and they type a question expecting answers. Although you can do that at the reference desk and similar places, the search tool is not the place.
Delay in updating the search index
For reasons of efficiency and priority, recent changes are not always immediately taken into account in searches. The index is typically updated every morning GMT. If you see the index lagging more than a couple of days, report it. For other technical issues with the search engine, please leave a message on the talk page.
Open search results and search suggestions in new tabs
Search suggestions and search results can be set to open in new browser tabs. Copy and paste the JavaScript (JS) from commons:MediaWiki:Search-results-new-tab.js directly into here: Special:MyPage/common.js. For more info see commons:MediaWiki talk:Search-results-new-tab.js. Do not try to import the JS. That only works on the Commons.
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