Help:Searching
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Wikipedia has its own search engine, with a search box on every page, and a special search results page. The search box has an activator magnifying-glass icon in it. A list of matching page names drops down as you type the query. The search box will navigate directly to those, but to get search results instead: choose Search, or choose "containing..." from the drop down list, or prefix the query with the tilde character (~).
An extra search box with graphical interface to advanced options is featured on the Search results page. It is especially for refining the list to a workable number of results. It has a frame for choosing areas of Wikipedia, or click on "Advanced" for even more precise areas, called namespaces. You must choose a page or go to the navigation-capable search box. If the query matches a page title, "There is a page named [page name] on Wikipedia" will be displayed.
Page-name completion is invoked by typing into the search box if you have JavaScript enabled. Click the mouse on them, or use the down key or tab to access them and enter to activate the navigation. Activating a search without typing anything into the search box goes directly to the search results page (as does Special:Search). For more information on the search box command line interface, see Search engine features, below. For searching for other than a page name, such as searching a page history, or for other content, see Special searches below. Special:Preferences offers many search options, and Wikipedia:Tools#Searching offers the setups of other users.
As is normal for most search engines the keyword OR is understood, characters that are not numbers or letters are ignored, and stemming is performed. Advanced search features of the Wikipedia search engine include wikitext searches, searches for templates, regular expression searches, wildcard searches, fuzzy spelling using ~, and other filters. (See Syntax below.)
Contents
Search results page
You can get to the search results page by entering what is not a page name (or a redirect), or by doing an empty search (clicking the magnifying glass, or pressing Go). The ordering of the list of search results is determined by the page ranking software.
- Matching terms are highlighted in bold. A match can show in the title or in the snippet, but not all matches can show when terms are far apart on the page.
- It reports that There is a page named Pagename when there was a direct match to a pagename, a disambiguation page, or a redirect (and thus, even to a section of a page).
- A message box may show up beside a listing, indicating that that page is linked to a sister page on another project, such as a Wiktionary entry tied to that Wikipedia page, but this only happens for listed articles.
- It can report that You may create the page "Pagename".
The use of the usual search box while on the search results page defeats the purpose of the page. There are two search boxes because the usual search box is on every page, but the intent of the search results page is to use the newly placed search box to refine a list of results. There are several ways to accomplish this, either with the mouse or by query commands typed into the search box. For example, if you want to see more terms highlighted use "OR", and if you want to remove results use "-". (See Syntax below.)
Refining results
Articles are in the main namespace, or "article space", but Special:Statistics will show that there are many times more pages on Wikipedia than there are articles on Wikipedia. Other types of pages are in other namespaces, and these can be searched by clicking one of the search domains in the grey frame just below the search box:
- If Multimedia is selected, the File namespace reveals page names with matching images, videos and audios. Your query matches titles (denoted "File:pagename"), data filenames, and their descriptions.
- If Help and Project pages is selected, resulting titles will start with "Help:" and "Wikipedia:". This search domain contains MediaWiki help (the software) and Wikipedia help (the project).
- If Everything is selected, the entire database is searched. (There are about thirty namespaces involved.)
- If Advanced is selected, the gray frame expands to reveal all the namespaces, and a check-box dialog. At the bottom you can arrange for the current choices to be remembered as your default search domain. To collapse the frame again, click on one of the search domains.
See Search engine features below for using search box commands to refine results by adding filters.
Other uses
To get Wikipedia search results while on any web page, you can temporarily set your browser's (web-based) search box to interface the Wikipedia search engine and land on Wikipedia's search results page; see Help:Searching from a web browser. This trick removes the need to first navigate to Wikipedia from a web page, and then do the search or navigation. It is a temporary change, and then you put it back to your preferred web-search engine.
Say while on some web page, you decide to research, at Wikipedia, material on that web page. You change your web-search box to "Wikipedia (en)", and enter the page name or the query while on that web page. The other example is that you decide to contribute information from the web to Wikipedia. Furthermore, you can reach all twelve sister projects the same way. For example, you can go straight to a Wiktionary entry by using the prefix wikt: from your web-search box.
User preferences
The default namespace to search is article space. But users can change this on the search results page Advanced dialog, and a search query can override this at the search box by specifying a single namespace as the initial search domain. A {{search link}} can set multiple namespaces, and these must be set in a search link having the same search result for all its users.
The search results page can open in a new tab. If your browser does not already have the manual ability to open any linked page in a new tab when you press and hold the Ctrl-key (PC) or ⌘-key (Mac), this functionality can be enabled at Preferences → Gadgets in the Browsing section. There are also custom user-scripts to make all search results always open in a new tab. (See the scripts available in See also.)
If you have an account you can set your default search domain: choose a set of namespaces from the search results page Advanced dialog, and select "Remember selection for future searches". You can also visit your Preferences → Gadgets page (requires JavaScript) to set up:
- your own search engine, to search Wikipedia to see its search results: go to Preferences → Gadgets Appearance.
- a wider search box. (Go to Appearance.)
- the suggestions that drop-down from the search box as you type (Appearance).
- wildcard searches, e.g., spark* (the Advanced section).
Redirects
If your query matches in the title of a redirect pagename, that redirect will show in the parenthetical beside the listed page name: "(Redirected from Redirect pagename)". Multiple redirects to the same page are de-cluttered from both the drop-down list and the search results list, so that only one such redirect match will show. (For lists of redirects, see Category:Wikipedia redirects. For redirects to a page, see Special:WhatLinksHere.)
There is no search parameter that will include redirects or not. To learn all the commands the search box understands to refine search results, such as "namespace: intitle: word1 OR word2", see the next section. You won't need the mouse.
Search engine features
Searches start in a search domain from which initial selections are made and filters applied. The default search domain is the article space, but any namespace may be specified in a query. And at the search results page any number of namespaces can be specified, and users can keep those namespaces as their own default search domain. Partial namespace searches can be made by specifying the initial letters of a pagename. Search can instantly search all 37,197,242 pages on the wiki when the search is simple word or two.
Search can filter results by words in a page titles, template names used, category membership, namespaces, or pages linking to a specific page. Search can handle regular expressions, a sophisticated, exact-string, and string-pattern, search tool that is not offered by most public search engines.
Search has many features you need to know about in order to use it correctly:
- Folds character families. Diacritical folding automatically matches foreign terms: Citroen will match Citroën, and Aeroskobing matches Ærøskøbing.
- Ignores punctuation, brackets, math and other symbols, only recognizing words containing letters and numbers.
- Is case insensitive.
- Performs stemming on common words. (This can be turned off.)
- Searches all visible content after templates are rendered on that page.
Search has some nice features you might like:
- Performs proximity searches, telling how close the words in a phrase might be.
- Can perform a fuzzy search (typo-correction, spelling questionable) or accept wildcards for a letter or letters of a word.
- Can filter based on template usage.
- Affect page ranking rules.
The maximum query length is 300 characters.[1]
Syntax
The following features can be used to refine searches. Many of these links are a {{search link}}. (Search link is not guaranteed to exactly emulate the search box.)
- Phrases in double quotes – A phrase can be found by enclosing it in double quotes, "like this". Double quotes can define a single search term that contains spaces. For example, "holly dolly" where the space is a character, differs much from holly dolly where the space is interpreted as a logical AND.
- Boolean search – All major search engines support the "-" character for "logical not", the AND, the OR, and the grouping parenthesis. Logical OR can be specified by spelling it out (in capital letters); the AND operator is assumed for all terms (separated by spaces), but spelling out AND is equivalent. Parentheses are a necessary feature because (blue OR red) AND green differs from blue OR (red AND green).
- Exclusion – Terms can be excluded by prefixing a hyphen or dash (-), which is "logical not". For example while -refining -unwanted search results. For example credit card -"credit card" finds all articles with credit and card except those with the phrase "credit card".
- Wildcard search – A wildcard character *, standing for any length of character-string can suffix a word or string: this* returns results like "thistle". For example, the query pseudo* lists articles like Pseudohistory and Pseudoarchaeology.
- Search fuzzily – Spelling relaxation is requested by suffixing a tilde (~) like this~, with results like "thus" and "thins". This search technique is sometimes called a "sounds-like" search. For example, searching for charlie~ parker~ returns Charlie Parker, Charles Palmer, Charley Parks, etc.; the incorrect intropi~ finds entropy. A mnemonic: "ish" the adjective suffix.
- Search results! – Prefixing a tilde ~like this query always gives search results, never jumping to a single title. It functions as the keyboard shortcut to clicking on the "containing" option. For example, ~similiar finds pages with the misspelling, instead of being redirected to Similarity. Making tilde the first character disables a redirect. There will be no disambiguation page, no article, no single page as a result. Mnemonic: sentence prefixes "¡" or "¿", or the command "generate a wave of results".
Parameters
The three main search parameters are prefix, intitle, and incategory. These are named filters, followed by a colon, as in "filter:query string". The query string may be a term, or a phrase, or part or all of a page name, as ascribed below. The filters accept Boolean operators between them. A single "namespace:" filter can go first, and a single "prefix" filter can go last, as explained below.
- intitle: – Searching for "intitle:query" prioritizes the results by title, but it also shows the usual matches in title's contents. Multiple "intitle" filters may be used with Boolean operators between, such as "intitle: speed OR intitle: velocity", but "intitle: speed OR velocity" also works.
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Query Description intitle:airport All articles with airport in their title parking intitle: airport Articles with "parking" in their text and "airport" in their title intitle: international airport Articles containing "international" AND "airport" in their title (including Airports Council International) intitle: "international airport" Articles with the phrase "international airport" in their title
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- incategory: – Given as "incategory:category", where category is the pagename of a category page, it lists pages with [[Category:pagename]] in their wikitext. (Editors searching in namespaces other than mainspace will need to know the limitations these search results may contain.) Space characters in a page name can be replaced with an underscore instead of using double quotes; either way works, and even both at once works (but not on commons). "Incategory:" will also return pages in the adjacent subcategory; see for example, "category: incategory: History". Multiple "incategory" filters may be applied. A more graphical alternative to a single filter is at Special:CategoryTree. Because categories are important structures for searching for related articles, any use of this prefix is particularly effective for searching. For more on using the categories themselves to find articles, see Wikipedia:FAQ/Categories.
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Query Description ammonia incategory: German_chemists Starting with the articles listed at Category: German chemists, only the ones that have the word "ammonia" in their text incategory: "Suspension bridges in the United States" incategory: Bridges_in_New_York_City Articles that are common to both categories—the suspension bridges in New York City
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- namespace name: or All: – Given only at the beginning of the query, a namespace name followed by a colon limits search results to that namespace. It is a filter without a query string. "All:" searches all namespaces. Namespace aliases are accepted. A reader searching for articles from the search box need know nothing about namespaces, so the default user preferences are set to search only in article space; but an advancing editor can reset the default search-space preference to a particular namespace, or "all". When preferences are "all", namespace ":" means mainspace titles sort to the top. To search only Wikipedia and Help, or any two or more namespaces, see Refining results above.
- prefix: – "prefix:page name" patterns only the beginning characters of a pagename. Because the "beginning" characters can, if you need, go on to include the characters all the way to the end of the page name, prefix must include spaces, since page names often include spaces. For this reason prefix: must only ever be given at the last part of a search box query, and next character after the colon cannot be a space. Prefix does not search for partial namespace names, but requires at least a full namespace name to start to find pages, but prefix: also recognizes an alias of a namespace, and it recognizes redirects (or shortcut). Prefix is the most widely used and powerful filter as it can mimic the namespace filter, and because intitle: cannot easily target a single page, even together with other filters. Special:PrefixIndex is a MediaWiki, graphical, version, using only prefix: to find pages.
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Query Description Salvage wreck prefix:USS Articles containing the words salvage and wreck whose title starts with the characters "USS" wave particle prefix:Talk:Speed of light Speed of light talk pages with the terms "particle" and "wave", including the current and the archived talk pages wave particle prefix:Talk:Speed of light/ Same search, but only in the archived subpages "portal namespace" readers prefix:Wikipedia talk: Is equivalent to 'Wikipedia talk: "portal namespace" readers' Talk: "heat reservoir" OR "ocean current" Any discussion page in the entire encyclopedia with either of those phrases, including archived discussions language prefix:Portal:Chi Portal namespace page names that begin with "Portal:Chi" and have the word language in the page
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Note that the space characters are not very important except around "prefix". The query string of "incategory" is a page name (or "a category name"), and in a page name, the underscore is equivalent to space, and so underscore will suffice instead of the double quotes around the pagename with spaces in it. The "intitle" query is not a page name, but it also treats space and underscore equally, treating them as AND. (It even treats multiple spaces, and even mixes of spaces and underscores that way.) All filters can have between them multiple spaces (or underscores) (or a mix) without effecting search results. Multiple spaces are treated as a single space everywhere except around "prefix". (Namely, within and around Boolean operated terms, even if inside double quotes; in between adjacent filters; in page names; in starting characters of the search box query; in between the colon and the prefix parameter names "incategory", "intitle", or "all", or after that colon). "Prefix:" or a namespace name (or its alias) can have no space between its name and the following colon. And remember, "prefix:" is entirely literal after its colon, and so treats no space character, except as a space.
Stemming
All search words are automatically subject to stemming. There is a stemming: parameter but it changes no search result. Stemming may be deactivated by using double quotes. Stemming is a convention among search engines. See the following examples:
| Query | Description |
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| intitle:bär | All articles with "bär" or "baer" or "bar" or "bars" in their title. |
| intitle:"bär" | Articles containing "bär" in their title |
| intitle:bar | All articles with "bar" or "bär" or "bár" or "bars" in their title. |
| intitle:"bar" | same result as without double quotes |
Other search tools
Browsers can usually find strings on the page you are viewing with Ctrl+F or F3, or ⌘ Command+F on a Mac.
Other tools include:
- External link URL search - Special:LinkSearch is a tool for searching for URLs in external links in Wikipedia pages. For example, the page [[Special:LinkSearch/*.yahoo.com]] lists 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 wikipedia.org and the links above.
- Article title search - searches page titles using regular expressions. Notably, they can search exact names and literal strings, including punctuation marks and lower / upper cases. For example, to find titles containing "(Company", type "\(Company".
- CatScan — powerful search using categories, included templates, etc.
- WikiBlame — search for text in the revision history of a page
- User contribution search – finds all the edits by a user to a single page
If you cannot find what you are looking for
If you're looking for a place where wine comes from pronounced "Bordo", you can try searching for a more general article such as "Wine", "Wine regions" (returning "List of wine-producing regions") or other wine types such as "Burgundy" and see if it's mentioned there or follow links (in this case, to "Burgundy wine", which has several mentions of "Bordeaux", and links to "French wine" and "Bordeaux wine"). If you know it's in France, look at "France" or the Category:Cities in France, from where you can easily find Bordeaux. You can try various things depending upon the particular case; for "Bordo" wine, it's quite likely that the first letters are "bord", so search an article you've landed on for these letters. If you use Google to search Wikipedia, and click on "cache" at the bottom of any result in the search engine results page, you'll see the word(s) that you searched for highlighted in context.
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 is to type a question into the search bar and expect an answer; some Web search tools such as Ask Jeeves support this. The Wikipedia search is a text search only; questions, as such, can be asked at the reference desk and similar places. A search for how do clocks work? will return articles with the words how, do, clocks, and work, ignoring the question mark (in practice this can lead to articles answering simple questions).
Delay in updating the search index
Because people like to see their work in search results, the search engine attempts to update in near real-time. Edits made to pages via templates can take a little longer to propagate. If you see the index lagging more than a day or so, report it. For other technical issues with the search engine, please leave a message on the talk page.
See also
- mw:Help:CirrusSearch
- Meta:Help:Searching
- Wikipedia:Tools#Searching
- Wikipedia:Search engine test
- Category:Searching in Wikipedia
- Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts#Search
- MediaWikiWiki:Search
Ask for help on your talk page
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