Wikipedia:Searching

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Searching Wikipedia

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.

Shortcuts: WP:S WP:SEARCH WP:LOOK

Wikipedia search

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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.

In addition to the Wikipedia search results, a box on the right shows the most relevant results from our sister projects, such as Wikitionary, Wikisource and Wikibooks.

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.

Specialized uses of the Go button include the following:

To navigate to a section of a page using anchor notation, e.g. Poland#History.
To navigate to a special page, including one with a parameter following a slash, e.g. Special:Log/Jimbo Wales.
To navigate directly to a page on another language Wikipedia or Wikimedia project, using the appropriate interwiki prefix. For example, enter fr:France to go to the article "France" on French Wikipedia, or wikt:help to see the Wiktionary entry for the word "help".
To go quickly to the user contributions of an IP address – just enter the address, e.g. 123.45.56.89.

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 output 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.
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. This parameter can also be used to find category intersections. 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.
prefix: - queries are activated only on page names (namespace plus basename) starting with the characters given to the prefix parameter. The characters the prefix parameter takes activate the same pages as they would in the search box's name completion list or at Special:PrefixIndex. E.g. Salvage wreck prefix:USS will search the main namespace for salvage wreck, but only in articles whose title (basename) starts with the characters "USS". The prefix should be the last parameter entered. To search sets of subpages, in particular sets of archives, append a slash character, "/" to the page name. To setup an automatic prefixed search as a service, use {{search archives}} and {{search subpages link}} templates.

Disambiguation

You may type in something like Plaque, that takes you to a list of the many things you could mean by it. This is called a disambiguation page, and it's there to make things easier for you. If it wasn't for that, you'd have to read our minds and know exactly what multiword code we'd thought of for each one.

Redirection

Some things can be called by many names. The Flag of the United States, for instance, could be called the American Flag, the US Flag, or any of a dozen similar things. In this case, if you type any of those in, you will be redirected to the proper place. If instead of being redirected you're taken to a search menu, that means that nobody thought of that way of writing it. In that case, just try another form, or try something related like Flag or USA. Once you have found what you were looking for, consider adding redirect pages for the expressions you tried that didn't turn up anything. Chances are you're not the only one thinking about it this way so you'll make life easier for those after you.

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.

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

For an overview of how to find and navigate Wikipedia content, see Portal:Contents.

Multi-lingual Wikipedia search

You can do a multi-lingual Wikipedia search using Google Advanced Search or entering site:wikipedia.org in the Google search box.

Lumrix: AJAX driven Wikipedia search engine. Supports other languages such as German, Spanish, or French.

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.

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.

External search engines

See Wikipedia:External search engines

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.

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.

Browser-specific help

See Wikipedia:Browser-specific searching help