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Help:Searching

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Eob (talk | contribs) at 21:29, 21 May 2002 (Add google search button.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

These are some hints about the search box which appears on every Wikipedia page.

Avoid short and common words. Currently, no words shorter than four characters will be found, and any search which involves these words will fail. So use "aquarius" instead of "the age of aquarius". Don't bother searching for the German Neuesachlichkeit artist "Otto Dix" under the current regime. We have him (see Otto Dix), but you can't find him by searching. The same applies to longer common words such as "every", "about", "onto" etc. Every search involving those will fail.

All search terms must be present. Only pages will be returned which contain all the words exactly as you typed them in. So if you didn't get any results, make sure that all search terms were spelled correcly. Furthermore, if you searched for "Horse", then articles which contain "Horses" but not "Horse" won't be shown.

Search is case-insensitive. The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.

Matching titles presented first. The pages whose titles match your query will be returned first. The results are ordered in terms of mechanical relevance (occurrences of search terms).

Only main namespace searched. The search only applies to the main namespace (those articles without "wikipedia:" or "talk:" or "user:" in front). The main namespace should contain the encyclopedia proper.

Boolean search possible. You can use the words "and", "or" and "not" and parentheses in order to formulate more complicated requests. If none of those words is specified, "and" is used by default. For instance, "indian not american" will return all pages with the word "indian" which don't contain the word "american". The search "(Adolph or Adolf) Hitler" will return all pages which contain "Hitler" and either "Adolf" or "Adolph".

No special symbols. Your search cannot contain apostrophes, quotes or other special symbols. If you want to locate information about "Avogadro's number" for example, the safest is to search for "(Avogadro or Avogadros) number".

No regular expressions. You cannot use regular expressions. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it.

Google Search of Wikipedia

If your search term includes words with three or fewer characters then you cannot use the Wikipedia's own search. You can however use use following Google search form.

<form method=get action="http://www.google.com/search"><INPUT TYPE=text name=q size=40 maxlength=255 value=""><INPUT type=submit VALUE="Wikipedia Google Search"><INPUT type=hidden name=domains value="wikipedia.com"><INPUT type=hidden name=sitesearch value="wikipedia.com"> <A HREF="http://www.google.com/advanced_search?as_sitesearch=wikipedia.com">Advanced Search</form>


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