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I think I'd better say clearly that recent changes I made actually change what users are recommended to do. The document essentially said "spaces are optional in most cases, but in a few instances must not be present" (e.g., in, Insource:). I think that is confusing. There is no reason to type spaces if they're not needed, so I've changed this to say essentially "don't use spaces if they're not needed, but they're usually (not always) ignored if you do". Full details were, and are continued to be, supplied; it's just the recommended use that's changed. I've also removed some unnecessary spaces from examples. I've already done this, and nobody seems to be objecting, but I thought I'd better point it out. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 19:00, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
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Is it possible to exclude all subpages from a Wikipedia search? Help:Searching gives only a way to restrict your search to subpages. I want to search the WP namespace without sifting through a thousand results for WP:Articles for deletion/Foo and the like. Is this possible? —67.14.236.50 (talk) 00:42, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
If what I search for in the search box is
that works fine as does
But if I search for
The first hits are for things like the article on quotation marks. This occurs regardless of the contents of the strings inside the quotation marks. Ideas?Naraht (talk) 16:06, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
Pursuant to the discussion at WP:VPT#GA reviews, I suggested and Edgars2007 followed up on the creation of a page to WP:Request a query based on the success of the similarly named page at Wikidata. Just wanted to let the kinds of persons who follow the page here know about it, in case someone comes along and find their search insufficient. --Izno (talk) 17:38, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
In you use the Chrome browser with Windows then you can add a setting to the browser's context menu that enables you to use google to make a restricted search of wikipedia from any webpage for words that you highlight in the page.
Now, whenever you want to search for a word or series of words in any page from within Chrome simply highlight the search item, right-click on it, select 'Context Menu Search' and select 'en.wikipedia'.
My questions
site:en.wikipedia.org
in the search box. I think Chrome instructions for a shortcut to this is too detailed. https://www.google.ca is Google Canada. Please use https://www.google.com if you make instructions anywhere. Help:Searching from a web browser seems better suited for browser details. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:49, 13 May 2017 (UTC)In the ongoing effort to improve the discoverability of all the world's knowledge, the Discovery team is proposing an enhancement to the search results page on Wikipedia (Special:Search). The goal of this feature is to display related content for each individual search result returned from query, so that even when the search result itself isn't maybe entirely useful, perhaps its related content would be. We would like your early feedback on this new feature—more information can be found on MediaWiki about the explore similar functionality and testing can be done in your own browser, using step by step self-guided testing instructions. DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
When searching for "Robert Phillip Hanssen" (double L), the page Robert Hanssen (full name:Robert Philip Hanssen - single L) does not even appear in the list of results. When searching on Google, the first result is Robert Hanssen. Maybe searches like this can be improved. — Ark25 (talk) 16:35, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
I want Wikipedia to know about me and create a page about myself. Yatin Mehndiratta (talk) 08:43, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
See [1]. Basically, if a page has a multi-word title, and you search for an exact one of the words in that title, you'd expect to find that page in the search results, but it is rarely even on the first results page. Instead you get lots of irrelevant stuff that isn't spelled the same way. Is this a bug? What can we do? Equinox ◑ 21:23, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
"hordeic"
in quotation marks to only get exact matches. Per Help:Searching#Parameters, search intitle:hordeic
to only get results from titles. They can be combined with intitle:"hordeic"
. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:12, 13 July 2017 (UTC)Hi, Sorry for sounding stupid but how does one search for the most recent results ?,
-recent
and prefer-recent
doesn't work for me? (IE when I search ""London" -recent" or ""London" prefer-recent" I still get jumbled results), Thanks, –Davey2010Talk 21:28, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
This is after I asked this question and got an answer here. However I either didn't ask the question correctly, or I simply haven't been able to use the answer to get to where I need. I want to search for all articles (not categories) that have been assigned: 1. any category whose title includes the term "Scorsese", boolean-AND 2. any category whose title includes the term "comedy". I tried advanced search by checking only the box for Category but this is for category results, and there is no single category that includes both these terms. I checked also the Article box, but I got many unwanted results. Then I tried various combinations with filters and boolean operators but I can't seem to get what I need. Any further clues? Thank you. Hoverfish Talk 22:36, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
insource
search in the article namespace. --Izno (talk) 01:56, 19 July 2017 (UTC)This edit request to Help:Searching has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Hitech waterproofing (talk) 09:40, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
...or something that is likewise non-genderized. This turns up to the right on the search page where the suggestions are offered. It sounds off and awkward and inappropriate. Like something from the ministry of feminist information, like some kind of female only endeavour. Please stop this double standard. If you have to say "humanity" or "humankind" instead of "man" or "men" then it's only fair to stop this "sister" nonsense too. Gender bias free language should apply all around. Thanks. Alialiac (talk) 17:32, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
Is there any way to limit a search to specifically text within a <ref></ref> pair or specifically to everything that isn't inside them? I know regex, and I'm sure that a sufficiently complicated insource regex could do it, but I'd rather not, if there was any other way.Naraht (talk) 15:49, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
This edit request to Help:Searching has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Remove the dash from the last list item of § Syntax. None of the other entries begin with a dash. 67.14.236.50 (talk) 08:00, 6 January 2018 (UTC)
In case anyone has been wondering about the &searchToken=something
at the end of the URL for a search result, I asked about it at mw:Help talk:CirrusSearch, and the summary is:
When publishing or saving a search link, there is no benefit in including the
&searchToken=something
at the end of the URL, so it's better left off.
--Pipetricker (talk) 15:23, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
RFC here, please join -> MediaWiki_talk:Wdsearch.js#Add_link_to_search. --Superchilum(talk to me!) 10:51, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
Page should have a section on how to make ((search link|etc)) links. -Inowen (talk) 22:36, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
@Cpiral: I am confused by this edit. No, WP does not require Javascript. However, the placement of the emdashes indicates that you believe the "default" is Vector without Javascript. This is not the case for the majority of people. --Izno (talk) 13:35, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
As I look at the Qwika search page, it is showing "Updated Crime Data!" with a date of "Thu 31 Mar 11", which I take to mean that their crime data information was last updated 7.5 years ago. If the rest of the search engine is that old, perhaps the Qwika section should be removed from the Help:Searching page. Eddie Blick (talk) 01:05, 28 August 2018 (UTC)
This edit request to Help:Searching has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Change the title of § Exclusion character (prefixed hyphen) to Prefixed hyphen character for exclusion or similar for consistency with preceding subheadings. 96.8.24.95 (talk) 04:42, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
Main revamp is complete. I'll be back to work on this page some more. Though feel free to jump in and improve the page. The more the merrier. Below is a task list of work needed on the page. Feel free to add to it. — The Transhumanist 08:16, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
How do I search for article titles containing the word "Strasse"? I tried intitle:Strasse and intitle:"Strasse" and intitle:/Strasse/; they all returned titles with "Straße". -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:24, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
insource:
but not intitle:
(requested in phab:T156474). You can use https://tools.wmflabs.org/grep/ for that. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:11, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
intitle:
supports regular expressions, so intitle:/Strasse/
won't find "Straße" anymore. (But neither Help:Searching#intitle: nor mw:Help:CirrusSearch has yet been updated to document it.) --Pipetricker (talk 09:18, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
intitle:Strasse intitle:/Strasse/
to only find whole words. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:56, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
Has anyone already done a JS script that adds some way to get directly to Advanced Search without first having to do a search? I almost never use the search box to just search for something, unless I"m in "reader mode" and am not working as an editor. My usual routine is to enter something like asdfjasodfijasdofj in the search box and search on it, then get into advanced mode, then pick my namespaces, then replace the search string with what I'm actually looking for. Rather inefficient. Hoping there's a "widget" of some kind that puts advance search as a clickable icon or something next to the default search box, in the site-wide top menu. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:48, 13 July 2018 (UTC)
$.when( mw.loader.using( ['mediawiki.util'] ), $.ready ).done( function() {
mw.util.addPortletLink(
'p-personal',
mw.util.getUrl('Special:Search') + '?profile=advanced',
'Search',
'pt-Search',
'Go to advanced search',
null,
'#pt-logout'
);
});
I asked this question (more or less) over at the WP:Helpdesk, where is has been greeted with '???!?!?' so far. It is an unusual search request!
Tsing Yi North Bridge used to show geophysical coordinates displayed twice. For reference, Tsing Yi South Bridge still does. The coordinates were coming from both an embedded
and from Wikidata.
So the question is: how could I search for articles where the ((Coord)) template is used and where now Wikidata is enabled for the articles and has coordinates values? I can't see the ability to ask questions about Wikidata and a particular article.
I'd really hate to check every page that uses the ((Coord)) template, cuz I think it said 1.1 million? Shenme (talk) 03:00, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
The page "Universal welfare" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.
I clicked the "ask for it to be created" and it just sends me to "Wikipedia:Articles for creation" I don't see an "ask" function there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.206.181.191 (talk) 06:35, 5 April 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:RESULTS. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:06, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:LOPS. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:13, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:WILDCARDS. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:22, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:Regex. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:23, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect H:S. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:46, 14 May 2019 (UTC)
I want to find all instances of "Phi Alpha" on Wikipedia that are not part of "Alpha Phi Alpha" or "Phi Alpha Theta". But I can't get the look ahead or look behind syntax to work. Does Cirrus Search do look ahead/look behind examples? I know to pair whatever I can do in insource with simply searching for "Phi Alpha" in order to have it finish at all.Naraht (talk) 19:32, 8 July 2019 (UTC)
As discussed in more detail in Phabricator ticket T228925, it turns out that parentheses and the boolean operators AND
and OR
do not actually work as advertised in the documentation. The short term plan is to update the documentation to reflect current reality, and the long term plan is to fix reality to reflect the currently aspirational documentation. Here's the first draft of the update to go in the Help:Searching Logical operators section:
NOT
(negation) can be indicated by a "-
" (minus sign) or a "!
" (exclamation point) character prefixed to a search term, or by the NOT
keyword.(…)
are ignored by the search engine and have no effect.AND
and OR
are used by the search engine, but do not have the expected boolean logical meaning and should be used with great care. See the additional documentation for an in-depth explanation.I've also written a draft of the longer explanation (~1200 words) of the use of Logical operators in on-wiki search. Feedback is much appreciated! I still need to review the rest of the Help:Searching page and mw:Help:CirrusSearch page to see if any other changes are needed there. TJones (WMF) (talk) 15:29, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
I would expect intitle:/^Europe/
to show pages with titles starting with "Europe", but instead there are no results. Is the lack of support for ^
and $
in regular expressions a known limitation? Is there a workaround? falsifian (talk) 17:50, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
intitle:/Award$/
vs. intitle:/Awards$/
would have been relevant to this discussion. falsifian (talk) 18:10, 18 August 2019 (UTC)
The second example given in section incategory: (incategory:"Suspension bridges in the United States" incategory:Bridges_in_New_York_City) has no results, probably because all of the relevant articles are in subcategories of Category:Suspension bridges in the United States. Replacing the first incategory: with deepcat: appears to give the desired result. Should this be replaced with another example? (cathartid - talk) 01:33, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
The deepcat example (deepcat:"musicals") seems to be off. For some reason, if the category's first letter is not capitalized, the search doesn't seem to search in the subcategories. First see Category:Musicals and then compare these searches: deepcat:"musicals" vs. deepcat:"Musicals". The latter search also gives the following warning: "A warning has occurred while searching: Deep category query returned too many categories". Maybe we should change the example search and category to a smaller category with correct capitalization, for example to deepcat:"Musicals by topic"? 85.76.139.129 (talk) 19:58, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
Yes Cya37 (talk) 18:43, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
It says above, that this is not the place to ask questions. Where is it, then, that we ask questions about how "search" works, or more specifically, how it doesn't work? I have some queries that are not getting the desired and expected results. Thanks. Gah4 (talk) 02:35, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
insource:/.../
makes exact character matches so you only find cases with underscores. If you also want spaces then you can for example do insource:"List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation#" insource:/affiliation\#/. This gives 14 results instead of 1. It's optional to use spaces or underscores in the first part. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:44, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
[]\:";'<>?,./. A mixed string of greyspace characters and whitespace characters, is "greyspace", and is treated as one big word boundary. Greyspace is how indexes are made and queries are interpreted.). See also Help:Searching#Search string syntax.
insource:/search_term/i
as the slow route and [Aa]
where desired for the faster route. You can't get the same for spaces versus underscores unfortunately, so you should use a group ( |_)
or search on another term of interest such as affiliation
, above. --Izno (talk) 03:17, 18 October 2019 (UTC)This edit request to Help:Searching has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Menenaviation (talk) 11:25, 4 January 2020 (UTC) i want a editing account to publish my articles which will perform well in your website
please help me to get the editing account. thank you.
I am searching for the articles that contain the string "Vales" in the title - intitle:/Vales/. The search tool finds 76 items.
My request is to provide a list with the titles of the articles found, like this:
..
I think it would be really useful for the users. It can help them in many ways. For example to introduce the list in a text file and to further refine the search, using a text editor, or for using a robot for changing text in the respective articles (for example there are 237 articles containing the string "Neamţ County" and a robot should change the text into "Neamț County" - from T-cedilla to T-comma). Thank you. — Ark25 (talk) 21:44, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
.searchresult {display: none;}
.mw-search-result-data {display: none;}
&useskin=monobook
to the url. If you have MonoBook then place it in Special:MyPage/vector.css and add &useskin=vector
to the url. You can also manually apply the above css to a viewed browser window with a feature in most browsers. You can also add this to your common JavaScript:$( document ).ready( function() {
if ( mw.config.get( 'wgCanonicalSpecialPageName' ) === 'Search'){
mw.util.addPortletLink(
'p-tb',
location.href.replace( location.hash, '' ) + ( location.search ? '&' : '?' ) + 'useskin=monobook',
'MonoBook',
't-monobook',
'Repeat the search in MonoBook'
);
}
});
Is it possible to escape certain characters in the searchbox? I would like to search for intite:/, Ohio/ but it will ignore the comma character (,) so is it possible to escape this character? Like writing "\," instead of "," . Thank you. — Ark25 (talk) 21:05, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
The central help page now has a section about the articletopic:
search keyword which has been added a few weeks ago. Maybe worth adding here as well. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 19:28, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
Search, and this page, are a nightmare when it comes to pseudo-namespaces. Let's Eliminate or Document Limitations re. aliases and Pseudo-namespaces / pseudoaliases!
In the H:PARAM Parameters section, it's written under
namespace name:
...Namespace aliases, like "WP" for "Wikipedia", are accepted.
However, a search for T:dubious
or H:PARAM
fails.
Help:Searching#Namespaces is similarly unhelpful.
pseudo
doesn't appear even once on this entire help page!
Didn't the WMF fund the current search system? Perhaps adding support for Pseudo-namespaces (Wikipedia:Shortcut#Pseudo-namespaces, WP:PNS, WP:Namespace#Subject_namespaces sometimes called simply -and erroneously- namespaces!) would be easier than documenting all the shortcomings. Certainly seems feasible for a quick hack to make https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=T%3Adubious and the like much better.--50.201.195.170 (talk) 23:33, 3 January 2021 (UTC)
The section on Safari search doesn't seem to work any more. Is there a new way to search Wikipedia easily within the address bar of Safari? Cheers. Wikidea 10:54, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
Desert Cya37 (talk) 16:30, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
Are there any best practices or policies I can refer to on how Wikipedia makes content easier to find using search? I’m thinking particularly about how pages are organised and structured.
For example, are there any best practices on how articles are titled, when a page redirect or disambiguation page should be used, how categories should be structured etc.
I administer an instance of mediawiki, and the biggest criticism I hear is that nobody can find anything with search. Although we’re not using CirrusSearch, I largely put it down to a content structure that wasn’t well thought out and is governed poorly. Dshinks (talk) 20:06, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
@Izno, thanks very much for those - that’s exactly what I was looking for! Dshinks (talk) 21:31, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
This might help:
To limit Google or Bing searches to the English Wikipedia, include this in your search string: site:en.wikipedia.org.
You can even do a Google search of Wikipedia from Wikipedia's own search box! For example, to use Google to search for pages with "geology" in the title, type this into WP's search box: google:geology+site:en.wikipedia.org
This link does the same thing: google:geology+site:en.wikipedia.org.
Another way is to use Google's or Bing's advanced settings. (To get there from Google's or Bing's search page, click on the gear icon).
Qwerfjkl talk 22:15, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
This edit request to Help:Searching has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
96.4.175.92 (talk) 17:15, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
Search. Category. 194.50.14.172 (talk) 23:45, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
If I'm looking for a string which can contain Capital and Lower case greek letters, do I need to split them the way that I do in English or not. In other words, is the equivalent of the latin alphabet [A-Za-z]
[Α-Ωα-ω]
[Α-ω]
?Naraht (talk) 02:48, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
I wish to search all articles (and exclude redirects) that start with Dr without the dot after it.
I found the option of searching by excluding redirects using Special:PrefixIndex. However there, I cannot enclose the search term with quotes. If it was allowed, I only had to enter "Dr " with a space. Without quotes, on giving Dr followed by a space, the search seems to be removing the trailing space, and returns all entries that start with "Dr". Note that I had asked the same question in July at WT:Special:PrefixIndex and not got a response. Jay (talk) 05:34, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
"String" can have different meanings. For example, if I wish to search for placenames that include the string "borough" it's not clear from this information page how to do this, especially if one wants to make the results easier to navigate by excluding all occurrences of the word "borough". It'd be great if such a search could be executed by typing something like *borough -borough in the search box but it doesn't work. Dadge (talk) 04:07, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Is there any meta- or external source where we can get some statistics on the search terms used within Wikipedia? I know this is possible to do with Google, e.g. using [Google Trends, and I know it's possible to see the page views via the Stats links on the page histories. But is there something that shows search term usage within Wikipedia? Chumpih. (talk) 10:26, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
I can regex a range of Greek Letters without a problem. for example insource:/\('''[Α-Ω]+'''/ however, I am unable to figure out how to do the equivalent for Hebrew. None of the possibilities seem to work, replacing the A with an א and Z with ת nor doing it the other way around (so that the window thinks it is a single string reading RTL, nor even flipping the [ and ] seem to work, could someone please help me figure out the way to do a search for a parentheses, three quotes and a string of Hebrew letters?Naraht (talk) 14:17, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
I've been doing some maintenance using this whopper of a query; although it has some false positives, it's quite good at finding instances where someone just typed "citation needed" instead of using ((citation needed)). Anyway, I made a huge AWB run and edited a bunch of the pages manually to fix the formatting. Yet if I run the search, I'll still see previews (with the misformatted original source text) for a bunch of articles I know I just fixed. I'm not entirely sure on how the search cache is built -- so this may be a completely impossible task -- but is there any way to tell the search engine that I demand a search of current article text, and not the cached search results from a couple hours ago? jp×g 05:58, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Wikipedia:S and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 March 21#Wikipedia:S until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:27, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
Any suggestions for searching for a string only outside of a reference? Naraht (talk) 17:31, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
A proposed edit to the Medicago rigidula Wikipedia page under the Scientific classification. Division/phylum: Tracheophyta, Class: Magnoliopsida, Order: Fabales, Family: Leguminosae/Fabaceae. Crystali18 (talk) 20:32, 12 April 2022 (UTC)
:Copied to Talk:Medicago rigidula with a help-me template. HLHJ (talk) 21:19, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
This edit request to Help:Searching has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
pbskidscarebearsfamily
pinballfunding watching watchingvhscarebearsfamily1998dvdbluraydiscbookreadcolormakingpinba lpinkrainbownextpinballwatching1998 cheersbearspbskids watchingstorybook storycolor nortecolorwatching1998 drawline watching makercrayoncoloredainchlirdrawcheersbearslovely watching arbook artcolor keybook yoyoy book story watching1998 2601:481:8600:C9C0:29F8:EB18:E08A:14EB (talk) 15:53, 15 December 2022 (UTC)