https://boseperformer.com/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=Help%3ASearchHelp:Search - Revision history2026-05-22T12:51:35ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.45.1https://boseperformer.com/index.php?title=Help:Search&diff=8417&oldid=prevST: first ed2008-09-21T01:53:18Z<p>first ed</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>==Tips==<br />
===Avoid short and common words===<br />
This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search.<br />
If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which",<br />
"such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any<br />
results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found.<br />
In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.<br />
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See [[Help:Common words, searching for which is not possible]] for the stop words filtered out by the database. From there one can at least go to a page with a stop word as title. Searching for the combination of one or more words and the common word "not" give a database query syntax error due to a bug in the software.<br />
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See [[Help:Short words in searches]] for a procedure to allow MySQL to index words shorter than four letters.<br />
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===Search is case-insensitive===<br />
The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.<br />
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<!-- ===Boolean search possible===<br />
You can use the words "and", "or" and "not" and parentheses in order to<br />
formulate more complicated requests.<br />
If none of those words is specified, "and" is used by default.<br />
For instance, "indian not american" will return all pages that contain the<br />
word "indian" but don't contain the word "american".<br />
The search "(Adolph or Adolf) and Hitler" will return all pages which<br />
contain "Hitler" and either "Adolf" or "Adolph".<br />
--><br />
<br />
===Words with special characters===<br />
In a search for a word with a [[w:diaeresis|diaeresis]], such as Sint Odili&euml;nberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "&amp;euml;". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odili&euml;nberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed -- the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent. See also [[Help:Special characters]].<br />
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=== Phrase ===<br />
Search for a phrase by enclosing it in double quotation marks.<br />
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===Wildcard===<br />
You can use a wildcard *, at the end of a search term only. To search for pages with the words "boat" or "boats" search like this: "boat*". You cannot use "*boat" to find Riverboat, etc.<br />
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==Searching limitations and Gotchas==<br />
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===No regular expressions===<br />
You cannot use [[w:regular expression|regular expression]]s.<br />
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===Words in single quotes===<br />
If a word appears in a page with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in pages, for which this problem does not arise.<br />
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An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.<br />
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===Delay in updating the search index===<br />
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes to pages are not always immediately taken into account in searches.<br />
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----<br />
This page is an excerpt of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Search Help:Search] at Wikipedia</div>ST