Help:Searching

The search input box at the top right will take you to the article which matches your query if it exists. Otherwise it displays the search results. If you want to force the display of search results, click on the search icon appearing in the search input box in order to be taken to Special:Search.

Search results page

The default search only applies to the Mainspace, where articles are stored. When searching for articles, a box on the right of the search results page shows the most relevant results from our sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikisource and Wikibooks. Other types of content pages can be searched by selecting an option from the grey search types box below the search input box.

If Multimedia is selected, you can search images, videos and songs stored on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons. This option will search their file names and descriptions.

If Help and Project pages is selected, you can search the "Help" and "Wikipedia" namespaces. These namespaces contain help pages, Wikipedia guidelines and policies, and all pages used for administration and maintenance of the site. If you have a specific question about Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Questions for where to find answers.

If Everything is selected, you can search all namespaces.

To search in any subset of namespaces, click Advanced on the search form. A quicker way to search a single namespace is to type 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.

Registered users can modify the default namespace to search in "My Preferences". They can also choose how much context and how many hits per page to display when viewing search results. See Help:Preferences for more information.

Navigation pages

Navigation pages will attempt to guide you to the correct article. You may encounter two types of these pages when searching for a topic.

Disambiguation

You may type in something like Plaque, that takes you to a list of the many things that you could mean by it. This is type of page is called a disambiguation page, and it's there to make things easier for you. Such a page prevents you from having to guess the exact phrase used to identify each page.

Redirection

Some things can be referred to by many names. The Flag of the United States, for instance, could be called the American Flag, the US Flag, or many similar things. Searching is setup so that if you search for any of those terms, you will be redirected to the proper place. If instead of being redirected you are taken to a search menu, then you have searched for a phrase has not been setup to direct to an article. In such a case, you may: look through the search results for an appropriate topic; try searching for an alternative spelling or name for the term; or try something related like Flag or USA. Once you have found what you were looking for, consider adding redirect pages for the expressions that you tried that did not lead to an article; Chances are that you are not the only one thinking about the topic this, way so you will make life easier for those who later search for the term.

Search engine features

The following features can be used to refine 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 search - By default logical AND is applied to all search terms, just as on all major search engines. One can also exclude terms with -, for example windows -system, or force OR boolean operation like this windows OR system (note the uppercase OR).

Wildcard search - Wildcards (characters taking the place of any other character or string that is not known or specified) can be prefixed and suffixed, for example, the query "*stan" will produce articles like Kazakhstan and Afghanistan.

Fuzzy search - Adding a tilde (~) at the end of a search word matches words with similar spelling. For example, searching for james~ watt~ identifies James Watt, James Wyatt, and James Watts as the first three search results.

intitle: - using the intitle: parameter, query results can be narrowed by title. The search word(s) given to intitle: can be anywhere in the title. Example searches using intitle:

Query	Result
intitle:airport	All articles with airport in their title.
intitle:international airport	Articles containing international and airport in their title (including World's busiest airports by international passenger traffic).
parking intitle:airport	Articles with airport in their title containing the text "parking".
intitle:"international airport"	Articles containing the exact expression "international airport" in their title.

incategory: - using the incategory: parameter returns pages in a given category (as long as the pages are directly categorized, and not transcluded through templates). 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. For more on using categories to find articles, see Wikipedia:FAQ/Categories. Example searches using incategory:

Query	Result
ammonia incategory:German_chemists	Articles containing the text "ammonia" among pages in Category:German chemists.
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.

prefix: - use the prefix: parameter to limit the results to article titles starting with the given characters. If a namespace is also given to prefix:, that page name will override any and all other namespace searches. Prefix: should be the last parameter in the query. See also, Special:PrefixIndex. Example searches using prefix:

Query	Result
Salvage wreck prefix:USS	Articles containing the words salvage and wreck whose title starts with the characters "USS".
prefix:Help:Contents/	Subpages of Help:Contents. Note that subpages are never used on the main encyclopedia.
"portal namespace" readers prefix:Wikipedia talk:	Discussions of any page in the Wikipedia namespace page having the word readers and the phrase portal namespace.
ocean heat reservoir prefix:Talk:Earth/Archive	Any archived discussion with the words heat and ocean and reservior.
language prefix:Portal:Chi	Portal namespace page names that begin with "Portal:Chi" and have the word language in the page.

Using the search to directly get to a page

When using the search to directly get to a page, it doesn't matter whether you enter capitals or lower case letters (unless there are two article titles which differ only in capitalization).

Specialized uses of the search to directly get to a page include the following:

• To navigate to a section of a page using anchor notation. For example, Poland#History.
• To navigate to a special page, including one with a parameter following a slash. For example, Special:Log/Example.
• 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. For example, 123.45.56.89.

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.

Specialist searches

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.

Using external search engines - See Wikipedia:External search engines

Other languages - You can search other language editions of Wikipedia from the global portal at http://wikipedia.org/. See also Wikipedia:External search engines.

If you cannot find what you are looking for

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.

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

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.

If you're looking for a straight definition of a word, try our sister project Wiktionary.

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 a couple of days, report it. For other technical issues with the search engine, please leave a message on the talk page.

Searching from your browser

You can also search directly from your Web Browser.