Help:Searching

A quick and easy way to find information on the is to look it up directly, with the full-text search function. On the top right of each page is a "" text box with two buttons beside it labeled "" and "".

Enter search keywords in the Search text box, then click:


 *  - (or pres on keyboard) to automatically show an article having the name entered, if one exists.


 *  - to search the text of all pages on the wiki (with some restrictions, see below).

When using the "" button, if a page with the name entered does not exist, a list of pages that match the search criteria will be returned.

If nothing matches the search kewords a message that no matches were found will be displayed.

How it works
Here is how the search works:


 * The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when "" has been clicked, 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.


 * When enclosing a phrase in quotes, the search looks for each word individually. E.g., entering "Larry loves Gentoo" it will return pages that contain "Larry" and "loves" and "Gentoo".


 * The search is not case-sensitive, so "Gentoo", "gentoo" and "GENTOO" all give the same result.

Restricting the search
If the "" button is clicked without entering any search term to the text box, a "Special:Search" page will be displayed providing extra search options. This page is also available from any search results list.

It may be useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular namespaces e.g., only search within the User pages. Check the namespaces require for the search before running the query.

By default only the namespaces specified in the preferences will be searched. Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default. This can be done by selecting and deselecting boxes in the "" section of user preferences.

External resources

 * Search documentation page on Wikipedia