Wikipedia

Help:Searching

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Patrick (talk | contribs) at 21:35, 20 March 2004 (Reverted edits by 24.71.223.141 to last version by Timwi). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

[[da:Wikipedia:Hvordan s%F8ger jeg i Wikipedia]]

Part of this page has been copied to meta:MediaWiki User's Guide: Searching for pages and adapted for MediaWiki in general. When you want to edit the text, compare the two pages to see where the edit can best be made,

Please note that a-z come after A-Z, e.g. Wikipedia comes after WikiWiki.

Google search of Wikipedia

By following the links below, you can use the Google search engine to search Wikipedia - either all languages, or English-only. Google indexes all namespaces. Google updates its index about once a month, the search is based on the contents at that time! The search is based on the text the browser shows, not on the source text which is seen in the Wikipedia edit box. Searching through Google is faster than a Wikipedia search. After finding an article one can choose to view the current version or the cached one (older, but again it may be faster).

Unfortunately the Google cache of the English Wikipedia is spread over three domains:

If you frequently search via Google, consider installing the Google Toolbar. Using the "search this site" button allows you to quickly search the English version of Wikipedia. The official Google Toolbar is only for Windows with Internet Explorer, but there is an unofficial version for Mozilla which is open source and works on all operating system platforms for which Mozilla is available, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Search facility of Wikipedia (sometimes disabled)

The native Wikipedia search feature, available via the search box that appears on every Wikipedia page, is occasionally turned off when load on the server is too high. Here are some hints for using it effectively (see also Wikipedia:User preferences help, "Search result settings" section, and Wikipedia:Go button).

Limiting results

As opposed to for instance Google, 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.

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.

To exclude results that include some word, put a "-" at the beginning: search -engine

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", "onto"), it will be ignored by the search system. If you're trying to do a phrase search or all-words-only search, this may result in returning nothing at all. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all articles, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.

See Wikipedia:Common words, searching for which is not possible for the stop words filtered out by the database. From there one can at least go to an article with a stop word as title. Searching for the combination of one or more words and the common word "not" gives a database query syntax error due to a bug in the software.

Search is case-insensitive

The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.

Wildcards

You can use some limited wildcards if you really want to, but I forget offhand what. 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 Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); 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: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 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.

Redirects can be excluded

Check or uncheck the tickbox "List redirects" in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.

The source text is searched

The source text (what one sees in the edit box, also called wiki text) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for Wikipedia: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.

Delay in updating the search index

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

At the moment, the search engine uses an index that isn't updated at all. This is temporary.


NB: Search has inconsistencies

A search for "Syrian Church of the East", may direct the user to a page about the Calvary Baptist church in Manhattan!

After searching for "Chaldean Church", a user reported that wiki made him attend the "Uniting Church in Australia".

Earlier, a search for "neighbourhood watch" sent users to a "neighbourhood watch" titled page. A search for the US-spelled "neighborhood watch" persistently and automatically sent users to a page titled "tornado watch".


The search feature is not guaranteed to be reliable, and may return unexpected and unintelligent results.


There is a meta-search available that allows you to search different language Wikipedias at the same time.

Multi-lingual Wikipedia search (disabled)

You can also do this using Google.

Bookmarklets

User:AxelBoldt has created some bookmarklets for Wikipedia searching. You can get them here.

Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Beonex Communicator, and Mozilla Firefox have a feature called search plugins, allowing the sidebar to automatically access a search engine. You can automatically install the plugin from the Mycroft project by searching there for "Wikipedia".

Here are ways to search Wikipedia with Mozilla-Based browsers:

1: Search Wikipedia from the Sidebar search tab or web address bar: - Works With: Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Beonex Communicator, Mozilla Firebird

Mozilla, Beonex Communicator, and Netscape 6 & 7 come with a sidebar that allows a user to search the Wikipedia site. To do this:

Go to Mycroft and search for the Wikipedia plugin. There are versions for many languages, so pick the language local to your area. If you want to, you can download the english Wikipedia plugin here. The file is 1.13 KB and is ZIPped.

Place the plugin(s) you downloaded in your /searchplugins/ folder. To make Wikipedia your default search engine (This works in Mozilla, Beonex Communicator, and Netscape 6/7. It does NOT work in Phoenix): Go to

Go to Edit, Preferences. Expand the Navigator tree and choose Internet Search. Choose Wikipedia as your defalt search engine. With Wikipedia selected as your default engine, searches can be conducted via the search sidebar tab, search box, or the web address bar.

2: Search Wikipedia from the Wikipedia search Tab - Works With: Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Beonex Communicator


Wikipedia can also be searched via a sidebar tab of it's own. To install the tab, click the link below:

Click here to add the Wikipedia search sidebar.

When installing, JavaScript needs to be enabled (This can be done by going to Edit, Preferences, expanding the Advanced tree, and checking the Navigator box under the "Enable JavaScript for" section.)

3: Search Wikipedia using a bookmarklet - Works With: Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Beonex Communicator, Mozilla Firebird


Wikipedia can also be searched via a bookmarklet. To do that, do these steps:

Go to this web address: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=%s. Bookmark the site.

Go to Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks. Choose the bookmark you have just created. Highlight the Bookmark and click Properties.

In the dialogue that comes up, put a lowercase w in the keyword box. Click OK and close out the properties box. Now close the bookmark manager.

To search, type w SEARCH_QUERY and press enter.

4: Search Wikipedia via an update to prefs.js - Works With: K-Meleon


K-Meleon has a search button that can be used to search Google. Wikipedia can also be searched. To switch search engines do these things:

Close K-Meleon.

Open up prefs.js with a text editor. The file should be in your K-Meleon\Profiles\PROFILE_NAME\RANDOM_STRING.slt.

Add this line:

user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=");

Save prefs.js.

Open up K-Meleon and press the search button to search Wikipedia. To go back to Google or to use another search service, delete the line

user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=");

and follow the first three steps. Make sure K-Meleon is closed before editing prefs.js.

Advanced: Wikipedia Search field for Opera browser.

Both Opera 6 and 7 use a customizable text file called search.ini. This file should only be edited while Opera is not running. The following example replaces one of the existing pre-defined search engines. It is up to the user to avoid conflicts of shortcut key (key=) and menu accelerator letter (& in name). 

[Search Engine 12]
Name=&Wikipedia
URL=http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=%s
Query=
Key=w
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=utf-8
Search Type=8
Verbtext=17063
Position=6
Nameid=0

Position sets the position of this search on the personal bar, with 0 being the first position and -1 for disabled. Most importantly you should back up your customized search.ini because the file is overwritten by the Opera installer.

More Information (External Links)

Searching with TomeRaider

After downloading the Wikipedia:TomeRaider database one can search the Wikipedia version offline. One can also search for parts of words.

Searching the page history

To search the text that appears only in the page history, you must export the text to XML format first.

If you cannot find an appropriate page on Wikipedia

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. Or if you have a question to be answered by Wikipedia, ask it at the Reference desk.

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