Help:Searching

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For documentation of the search feature in Wikimedia wikis, see Help:CirrusSearch .

The quickest way to find information in MediaWiki is to look it up directly. On every page there is a search box.

Enter keywords and phrases and press Enter or Return or click the magnifying glass icon (or Search or Go button when using other skins).

If a page has the same title as what you entered, you jump straight to that page. Otherwise, it searches all pages on the wiki (with some restrictions, see below), and presents a list of articles that matched your search terms, or a message informing you that no page has all the key words and phrases.

How it works

• It searches all pages on the wiki with some restrictions.
• The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click "edit", not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
• The search functionality can be considered to operate on whole words, separated by spaces or other punctuation marks. So if your search term includes the word 'book', the results will not include pages that only have the word 'books' or 'booklet'. And if your search term includes the term 'inter', the results will not include pages that only have the word 'international', but they may include pages that have the term 'inter-national'.
• The results will only include pages that contain all the words in your search.
• You can search for all words that begin with a prefix by adding * at the end of a word in your query. For example, book* will return results for book and books.
• You can search for a phrase using double quotes. A phrase can be considered to consist of whole words, so the phrase 'Prime Minister' will not be found by a search for "ime Min", but it will be found by a search for "Prime Minister".

Restricting the search

If you click the "Search" button without filling in anything, you will be taken to "Special:Search" which gives you extra searching options (also available from any search results list).

You may find it useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular namespace e.g., only search within the User pages. Check the namespaces you require for this search.

See also

• Category:Search
• Category:Search extensions
• Manual:Searchindex table
• Alternative backends:
  • Elasticsearch
• API:Search