Wikipedia has its own search engine (for "wikisearching") as represented by the search box and the 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 "" from the drop down list, or add the tilde ~ character to the query.
An extra search box on the is especially for refining the list to an acceptable number (shown). It has a frame for choosing areas of Wikipedia, or click on "Advanced" for even more precise areas, called . You must choose a page or go to the navigation-capable search box. If the query matches it will say There is a page named "Page name" on Wikipedia.
The page-name completion is accomplished by the down-arrow button. Tab selects page names on the search results list, and Enter will activate the search box, which if empty, it goes directly to the search results page, or you can navigate to . 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 Specialty searches below. offers many search options, and Tools#Searching offers the setups of other users.
Various search options are allowed (see below: Syntax), such as: word1 word2, "find phrase", -exclusion, respell~, *end, begin*, blue OR (red AND green), prefix:xx, intitle:xx, and incategory:xx (see below: Stemming). For uncertain spellings, the form: respell~ typically matches more words, such as: mariland~. A search box automatically queries the database if the contents of the search box do not exactly match a page name.
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 by relevance or user settings.
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Important terms are highlighted in bold lettering
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It will advise There is a page named pagename on Wikipedia when there was a direct match to a pagename, a disambiguation page, or a redirect (and thus, even to a section of a page).
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A message box may show up beside a listing, indicating that that page is linked to a , such as a Wiktionary entry tied to that Wikipedia page, but this only happens for listed articles.
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
are in the main
namespace, or "article space", but
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 on one of the filter-activation "links" in the grey frame just below the search box:
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If Multimedia is selected, the File namespace reveals page names with matching images, videos and songs. Your query matches titles (denoted " File: pagename"), data filenames, and their descriptions.
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If Help and Project pages is selected, resulting titles will start with " Help:" and " Wikipedia:", indicating the namespaces, which contain basic help, and also Wikipedia guideline, policy, maintenance and administration pages.
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If Everything is selected, the entire database is searched, and there are about twenty-six namespaces, but only four others besides articles are commonly searched: Wikipedia, Help, Template, and Category.
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If Advanced is selected, the gray frame expands to reveal all the namespaces, each with a check-box indicating the search status.
Talk pages are in their own, respective namespaces, and are not included in these selections.
See Search engine features below for using search box commands to refine results.
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 the search results page: see
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 is 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 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 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 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 create an account you can visit your page (requires JavaScript) to set up:
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to search Wikipedia with your own search engine to see its search results ( under Appearance)
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to acquire a default set of namespaces that you usually search in. ()
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to widen the search box ( under Appearance)
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to change the Go and Search buttons to a simple magnifying-glass icon () ( Enable simplified search bar (Vector skin only))
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to disable the quasi-search results that drop down from the search box while you type ()
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. The "List redirects" check-box in the
Advanced frame from underneath the search results box is not really functional. (For lists of redirects, see
Wikipedia redirects. For redirects to a page, see
.)
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
The internal search engine can search for parts of page titles or page title prefixes, and in specific and . 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 .
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 diacritical marks such as 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).
Many non- characters are ignored. It is not possible to search for the string |LT| (letters "LT" between two vertical bars) as used in some convert templates for long tons; all articles with "lt" will be returned. Some characters are treated differently; "Credit (finance)" will return articles with the words "credit" and "finance", ignoring the parentheses, unless an article with exact title "Credit (finance)" exists.
Syntax
The following features can be used to refine searches. Many of these links are a . (
Search link is not guaranteed to exactly emulate the search box.)
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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, where the space is a character, differs much from where the space is interpreted as a logical AND.
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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 differs from .
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Exclusion – Terms can be excluded by prefixing a hyphen or dash (-), which is "logical not". For example while -refining -unwanted search results. For example finds all articles with payment and card, but not " credit card".
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Wildcard search – A wildcard character *, standing for any length of character-string can prefix or suffix a word or string: *like will return "childlike" and "dream-like"; this*, returns results like "thistle". For example, the query lists articles like Kazakhstan and Afghanistan.
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Search fuzzily – Spelling relaxation occurs by suffixing a tilde (~) like this~, with results like "thus" and "thins". For example, searching for would return James Watt, James Wyatt, and James Watts. A mnemonic: -ish.
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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, finds pages with the misspelling, instead of being to Similarity. Making tilde the first character disables a redirect. There will be no disambiguation page, no article, no single page as a result. A mnemonic: "wave of "
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.
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intitle: "Intitle: query" prioritizes the search 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 , but "intitle: speed OR velocity" also works.
- :
> |
|
| | All articles with airport in their title |
| | Articles with "parking" in their text and "airport" in their title |
| | Articles containing "international" AND "airport" in their title (including Airports Council International) |
| | 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 these search results may contain.) Space characters in a pagename can be replaced with an underscore instead of using double quotes; either way works, and even both at once works. "Incategory:" will also return pages in the adjacent subcategory; see for example, . Multiple "incategory" filters may be applied. A more graphical alternative to a single filter is at . 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 FAQ/Categories.
- :
> |
|
| | Starting with the articles listed at German chemists, only the ones that have the word "ammonia" in their text |
| | Articles that are — 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 are accepted. A reader searching for articles from the search box need know nothing about namespaces, so the default 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". To search only Wikipedia and Help, or any two or more namespaces, see Refining results above.
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prefix: Given only at the last part of a search box query, "prefix: page name" refers to matching only the beginning characters of a . It treats each character entirely literally. The next character after the colon cannot be a space. Any space character in the query must be left bare, and that is why it is the last string in the query. The namespace portion of the page name must use the page name; so it will not recognize an of a namespace, or a redirect (or shortcut). Prefix is a powerful filter alone, or used with other filters. The singular alternative is at .
- :
> |
|
| | Articles containing the words salvage and wreck whose title starts with the characters "USS" |
| | Speed of light talk pages with the terms "particle" and "wave", including the current and the archived talk pages |
| | Same search, but only in the |
| '' | Is equivalent to 'Wikipedia talk: "portal namespace" readers' |
| | Any discussion page in the entire encyclopedia with either of those phrases, including archived discussions |
| | Portal namespace page names that begin with "Portal:Chi" and have the word language in the page |
Note that the are not very important except around "prefix". The query string of "incategory" is a (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:
|
|
| | All articles with "bär" or "baer" or "bar" or "bars" in their title. |
| | Articles containing "bär" in their title |
| | All articles with "bar" or "bär" or "bár" or "bars" in their title. |
| | same result as without double quotes |
Searching within a page
The internal search engine cannot locate occurrences of a string within the page you are viewing but browsers can usually do this with , or on a Mac.
Special searches
Single characters cannot be itemized in searches. Titles are case sensitive except for the initial character of a page name, but redirects hide most capitalization requirements.
Diacritical marks such as and accents are well regarded, just as they are when (the character-sensitive) prefix: is used. Most pages are redirected from their near equivalents. For example, Citroen will probably have a redirect to Citroën, and Aeroskobing redirects to Ærøskøbing.
Other special searches include:
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External link URL search - is a tool for searching for URLs in external links in Wikipedia pages. For example, the page lists all Wikipedia pages linking to Yahoo.com.
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External search engines – see External search engines and Tools#Searching
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Other languages – for searching other language editions of Wikipedia see and the links above.
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Toolserver – there are multiple //wiki.toolserver.org/view/Category:Tools on , most notably:
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//toolserver.org/~vvv/grep.php?wiki=enwiki_p&ns=0 (//toolserver.org/~jarry/grep/?lang=en&wiki=wikipedia&ns=0) — search page titles using regular expressions. Notably, they can search exact names, including punctuation marks and lower / upper cases. For example, to find titles containing "(Company", type "\(Company".
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//toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php — powerful search using categories, included templates, etc.
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//toolserver.org/~kolossos/tree/search.php?pro=wikipedia&langauswahl=en
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 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 . 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 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
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, such as between 06:00–07:00 for scans made 03:00–04:15 (UTC). 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 .
See also
