Help:Advanced search

Further information: Help:Searching

This help-page, Help:Advanced_search, summarizes the search options. The Wikipedia page-search feature (aka wp:wikisearch) has some advanced features to tailor searches to "prefix:" word-prefixes or "intitle:" words within a page name. The advanced-search URL is as follows:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=zz-vwxyz&fulltext=Search&profile=advanced&redirs=1

In that URL, the option "profile=advanced" shows the screen for advanced-search options, with a checklist to select which wp:namespace of pages to search.

Overview of features

Special search box just for Search, with the general search domains listed below. Click on one to search that domain.

Clicking on Advanced shows the namespaces of the wiki. Check namespaces to set either your current or your default search domain.

The internal search engine can search for parts of page titles or page title prefixes, and in specific categories and namespaces. It can also limit a search to pages with specific words in the title or located in specific categories or namespaces. It can handle parameters an order of magnitude more sophisticated than most external search engines, including user-specified words with variable endings and similar spellings. When presenting results, the internal search understands and will link to relevant sections of a page (although to a limited degree some other search engines may do this as well).

The internal search is also able to search all pages for project purposes, whereas external search engines cannot be used on any talk page, a large part of projectspace, and any page tagged as noindex.

The source text (as shown in the edit box) is searched for. 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. Entering an article title will jump to that article; to display a list of matches to the search term instead, prefixing the search term with "-" or "~" (see "Avoiding automatic direction to page" below) will force a full search.

Upper and lower case as well as some diacritical marks such as umlauts and accents are disregarded in search. For example, a search for citroen will find pages containing the word Citroën (c = C, e = ë). Some ligatures match the separate letters. For example, a search for aeroskobing will find pages containing Ærøskøbing (ae = Æ).

Many non-alphanumerical characters are ignored. It is not possible to search for the string |LT| (letters "LT" between two vertical bars) as used in some convert templates for long tons; all articles with "lt" will be returned. Some characters are treated differently; "Credit (finance)" will return articles with the words "credit" and "finance", ignoring the parentheses, unless an article with exact title "Credit (finance)" exists.

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• incategory: – Given as "incategory:category", where category is the pagename of a category page, it lists pages with [[Category:pagename]] in their wikitext. (Editors searching in namespaces other than mainspace will need to know the limitations these search results may contain.) Space characters in a pagename can be replaced with an underscore instead of using double quotes; either way works, and even both at once works. "Incategory:" will also return pages in the adjacent subcategory; see for example, "category: incategory: History". Multiple "incategory" filters may be applied. A more graphical alternative to a single filter is at Special:CategoryTree. Because categories are important structures for searching for related articles, any use of this prefix is particularly effective for searching. For more on using the categories themselves to find articles, see Wikipedia:FAQ/Categories.

Query	Description
ammonia incategory: German_chemists	Starting with the articles listed at Category: German chemists, only the ones that have the word "ammonia" in their text
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

• namespace name: or All: – Given only at the beginning of the query, a namespace name followed by a colon limits search results to that namespace. It is a filter without a query string. "All:" searches all namespaces. Namespace aliases are accepted. A reader searching for articles from the search box need know nothing about namespaces, so the default user preferences are set to search only in article space; but an advancing editor can reset the default search-space preference to a particular namespace, or "all". To search only Wikipedia and Help, or any two or more namespaces, see Refining results above.

• prefix: – Given only at the last part of a search box query, "prefix:page name" refers to matching only the beginning characters of a page name. It treats each character entirely literally. The next character after the colon cannot be a space. Any space character in the query must be left bare, and that is why it is the last string in the query. The namespace portion of the page name must use the page name; so it will not recognize an alias of a namespace, or a redirect (or shortcut). Prefix is a powerful filter alone, or used with other filters. The singular alternative is at Special:PrefixIndex.

Query	Description
Salvage wreck prefix: USS	Articles containing the words salvage and wreck whose title starts with the characters "USS"
wave particle prefix:Talk:Speed of light	Speed of light talk pages with the terms "particle" and "wave", including the current and the archived talk pages
wave particle prefix:Talk:Speed of light/	Same search, but only in the archived subpages
"portal namespace" readers prefix:Wikipedia talk:	Is equivalent to 'Wikipedia talk: "portal namespace" readers'
Talk: "heat reservoir" OR "ocean current"	Any discussion page in the entire encyclopedia with either of those phrases, including archived discussions
language prefix:Portal:Chi	Portal namespace page names that begin with "Portal:Chi" and have the word language in the page

Note that the space characters are not very important except around "prefix". The query string of "incategory" is a page name (or "a category name"), and in a page name, the underscore is equivalent to space, and so underscore will suffice instead of the double quotes around the pagename with spaces in it. The "intitle" query is not a page name, but it also treats space and underscore equally, treating them as AND. (It even treats multiple spaces, and even mixes of spaces and underscores that way.) All filters can have between them multiple spaces (or underscores) (or a mix) without affecting search results. Multiple spaces are treated as a single space everywhere except around "prefix". (Namely, within and around Boolean operated terms, even if inside double quotes; in between adjacent filters; in page names; in starting characters of the search box query; in between the colon and the prefix parameter names "incategory", "intitle", or "all", or after that colon). "Prefix:" or a namespace name (or its alias) can have no space between its name and the following colon. And remember, "prefix:" is entirely literal after its colon, and so treats no space character, except as a space.

Stemming

All search words are automatically subject to stemming. There is a stemming: parameter but it changes no search result. Stemming may be deactivated by using double quotes. Stemming is a convention among search engines. See the following examples:

Query	Description
intitle:bär	All articles with "bär" or "baer" or "bar" or "bars" in their title.
intitle:"bär"	Articles containing "bär" in their title
intitle:bar	All articles with "bar" or "bär" or "bár" or "bars" in their title.
intitle:"bar"	same result as without double quotes

Searching within a page

The internal search engine cannot locate occurrences of a string within the page you are viewing but browsers can usually do this with Ctrl+F, or ⌘ Command+F on a Mac.

See also

• {{wikitext}} – condensed wp:helpbox of wikitext syntax