This article provides a detailed overview of Wikipedia's search feature. Wikipedia search can be accessed in the "search" box at the left side of a Wikipedia window and also by using the "Search" special page.
For a short introduction to searching Wikipedia, see Look it up.
Wikipedia search
Type your keywords in the box to the left under "search" and then click:
(or Enter on keyboard) takes you to the article.
returns a list of articles and additional search options.
Go button
Main article:
Help:Go button - When using the Go button, it doesn't matter whether you enter capitals or lower case letters (unless there are two article titles which differ only in capitalization).
- If the Go button cannot take you directly to a page, it displays search results just like the Search button.
- The Go button can be used to go to pages on other projects, if you use interwiki prefixes. For example, de:test will take you to a page on German Wikipedia, and wikt:test will take you to the Wiktionary entry for "test".
Tips for effective searches
Phrases in double quotes
A phrase can be found by enclosing it in double quotes. For example, "holly dolly" returns six matches; holly dolly (two standalone words) returns more than 200.
Boolean searching
By default logical AND is applied to all search terms, just as on all major search engines. One can also exclude terms with -, e.g. windows -system, or force OR boolean operation like this windows OR system (note the uppercase OR).
Additional features
The following features can be used to refine searches:
- Wildcard queries - Wildcards (characters taking the place of any other character or string that is not known or specified) can be prefixed and suffixed, e.g. *stan will give various countries in Central Asia.
- Fuzzy queries - a word can be made fuzzy by adding ~ to its end, e.g. query sarah~ thompson~ will give all different spellings and similar names to sarah thompson.
- intitle: - using this colon-defined search parameter, queries can be limited to titles only, for example intitle:airport will return all articles with airport in their title and parking intitle:airport find all results for parking among articles with airport in their title. intitle:international airport will search for pages containing international and airport in their title (including World's busiest airports by international passenger traffic), while intitle:"international airport" will return pages containing the exact expression "international airport" in their title.
- prefix: - using this parameter, queries can be limited to pages beginning with a certain prefix. E.g. Salvage wreck prefix:USS will search all articles in Article namespace starting with USS for salvage wreck. The prefix should be the last parameter entered. This can also be used to search subpages, in particular archives. See also Special:PrefixIndex which lists all pages starting with a given prefix.
- incategory: - using this parameter returns results in a given category (as long as pages are directly categorized, and not transcluded through templates). For example ammonia incategory:German_chemists will return results for "ammonia" among pages in Category:German chemists. 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.
Namespaces
The default search only applies to the Mainspace, where articles are stored. Other types of content pages can be searched: multimedia, help and project pages, or everything.
Searching in a single namespace can be achieved by typing 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. To search in any subset of namespaces, click "advanced" on the search form. Depending on the web browser in use, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but without being effective any longer! To make sure, uncheck and then recheck it.
Searching the file namespace (multimedia, including images and songs) means searching the file names and descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the file description pages (details).
Logged-in users can modify the default namespace to search in preferences.
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 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, 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 couple of days, report it at WP:VPT.
Multi-lingual Wikipedia search
- Qwika has indexes for English, German, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Korean, Chinese, and Russian where the original content is combined with machine translated content from/to English.
Sister projects
At the right of Wikipedia search results, a box shows the most relevant results from our sister projects, such as Wikitionary, Wikisource and Wikibooks.
Definitions
If you're looking for a straight definition, try our sister project Wiktionary. For definitions of terms used in Wikipedia, check out the glossary or the tutorial's glossary.
Searching for external links
Special:Linksearch is a tool for searching for links from Wikipedia articles to sites outside Wikipedia. For example, all Wikipedia pages linking to Yahoo.com.
Display of search results
Logged in users can choose how much context and how many hits per page to display with a parameter in "My Preferences".
Other ways to find pages
Special:AllPages provides an alphabetical list of articles; other namespaces can also be selected. For an overview of how to find and navigate Wikipedia content, see Portal:Contents.
External search engines
- See Wikipedia:External search engines
Browser-specific help
- See Wikipedia:Browser-specific searching help
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, then see Where to ask questions, which is a list of departments where our volunteers answer questions, any question you can possibly imagine.
Using Wikipedia search to find category intersections
As of April 2008 it is possible to use the Search tool to find category intersections when pages use the categories directly (that is, when they are present in the article text, not transcluded through templates). To do so, type incategory:"CategoryName" in the search box. For example incategory:"Suspension bridges in the United States" incategory:"Bridges in New York City" will return the articles that are common to both categories — the suspension bridges in New York City.
For more on using categories to find articles, see Wikipedia:FAQ/Categories.
See also
