jones-Riki
Mon 17 October 2011, 01:01 pm GMT +0200
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 ? 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 umlauts and accents are disregarded in search. For example, a search for citroen will find pages containing the word Citro?n (c = C, e = ?). Some ligatures match the separate letters. For example, a search for aeroskobing will find pages containing ?r?sk?bing (ae = ?).
The following features can be used to refine searches:
* Phrases in double quotes ? A phrase can be searched by enclosing it in double quotes. For example, "holly dolly" returns very few results as opposed to holly dolly (two standalone words).
* Boolean search ? By default logical AND is applied to all search terms, just as on all major search engines. Parentheses and "OR" can also be used. For example windows OR system and combined: microsoft (windows OR system) (note the uppercase OR).
* Exclusion ? Terms can be excluded with by preceding them with -, with no intervening space. For example payment card -"credit card" will find all articles with payment and card, but not "credit card". Similarly credit card -"credit card".
* 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 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.
* Avoiding automatic direction to page ? Adding a tilde (~) at the beginning of a search word forces a search for a word or phrase across Wikipedia rather than being directed or redirected automatically to an article or disambiguation page. For example, ~similiar will find pages with the misspelling, instead of being redirected to Similarity. ~"Credit card"/~Credit card will not invoke the "Credit card" article, but will list all articles containing the phrase "credit card"/the words "credit" and "card". In most cases this is equivalent to entering the search term without tilde, but clicking on the "containing" option instead of going to the article.
* 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: