Wikipedia has its own search engine, with its search box on every page

Wikipedia has its own search engine, with its search box on every page. The search box will go to a given page name, but there are three ways to go to the search results page instead.Two central features of the search results page are a search box with larger font for editing the query that landed you there, and below that a collapsible frame for activating a search domain. The “Advanced” search domain is a selection of every type of page on Wikipedia, in areas called namespaces. If you try to navigate from the featured search box, you’ll only get a preliminary report saying thatTo navigate to a page instead of search, remember to type the page name into the usual search box there (on any page).As is normal for web search engines:Advanced features of the Wikipedia search engine include multi-word proximity-searches, wildcard searches, “fuzzy~” searches, searching with regular expressions, search domains and namespaces. Wikipedia’s search engine also has several, wiki-oriented, operators and parameters, for weighting and filtering. (See Syntax below.)For more information on the search box, see Search engine features, below. For searching for other than a page name, such as searching a page history, or for other content, see Special searches below. Special:Preferences offers several search options, and Wikipedia:Tools#Searching offers the setups of other users.You land on the page Search by way ofThe first two have empty queries, and the last two do not. You can also land on the Search page of Wikipedia by using your web browser search box from any web page. See below for how.In the search resultsSearch results will often be accompanied by a preliminary report.The Did you mean report corrects dictionary word spellings and gives a link that is either a wikilink that will navigation to an article or a search link that will perform a query. The distinction can be made by observing the presence of a You may create the page report. Another report corrects “spellings” to coincide with any “word” found in a search index (any word on the wiki).The Search page is designed for presenting and refining results in a re-search loop controlled by modifying the query or clicking on a search domain.Articles are in the main namespace, or “article space”, but Special:Statistics will show that there are many times more pages on Wikipedia than there are articles on Wikipedia. Other types of pages are in other namespaces, and these can be searched by clicking one of the search domains in the grey frame just below the search box. Its blue font turns black to show that it represents the search results.In order to fully interpret the search results page, check which search domain is in black font, but also remember to check for a namespace name at the beginning or a prefix: parameter at the end of the search box query:Equivalently, you could check the URL in your browser’s address bar for profile and namespace parameter settings, because the search query was sent to the search engine by way of that URL.Beyond setting the search domain to refine your search results, see Search engine features below for using the search box to achieve a high level of refinement by filtering and ranking results.To get Wikipedia search results while on any web page, you can temporarily set your web browser’s search box to become a Wikipedia search search box, even though you’re on another web site; see Help:Searching from a web browser. This trick removes the need to first navigate to Wikipedia from a web page, and then do the search or navigation. It is a temporary change, and then you put it back to your preferred web-search engine.For example, you flip your web-browser search engine to “Wikipedia (en)” while:You can just drag items on the page the name up to the web browser search box while on any web site, even in the lower sections of a Wikipedia page, where no search box is immediately available.You can reach all twelve sister projects the same way by using interwiki prefixesin the web browser’s search box. For example, you can go straight to a Wiktionary entry by using the prefix wikt: from your web-search box.The default search domain is article space, but any user can change this default, and have their own default search domain for all the queries they run. In any case a query always can specify a namespace to make the search domain explicit and override any default. At the search results page, Special:Search, Advanced dialog, a search can specify any number of namespaces, and a logged-in user can set there default search domain there by clicking “Remember selection for future searches”.Because the default search domain is a settable preference, any query you intend to share, publish, or save in a search link might need the search domain explicitly given in the search link in order to ensure consistent search results among all users, at any time. {{Search link}} defaults to article space but can specify multiple namespaces in its query.Visit your Preferences → Gadgets page (requires JavaScript) to set up:The search results page can open in a new tab. See Preferences → Gadgets Browsing There are also custom user-scripts to make all search results always open in a new tab. (See the scripts available in See also.)If your query matches in the title of a redirect pagename, that redirect will show in the parenthetical beside the listed page name: “(redirect from Redirect pagename)”. Multiple redirects to the same page are de-cluttered from both the drop-down list and the search results list, so that only one such redirect match will show. (For lists of redirects, see Category:Wikipedia redirects. For redirects to a page, see Special:WhatLinksHere.)Because a redirect is a page name, but it can also point to a section, a section can show up in the ranking of search result items, which are usually pages.There is presently no search operator or parameter that will include redirects or not. To learn some commands the search box understands to refine search results, see the next section. You won’t need the mouse.Searches start in a search domain; its pages are the initial search results before the query logic and filters are applied. The default search domain is the article space, but any namespace may be specified in a query. And at the search results page any number of namespaces can be specified, and users can keep those namespaces as their own default search domain. Partial namespace searches can be made by specifying the initial letters of a pagename. Search can instantly search all 38,534,261 pages on the wiki when the search is simple word or two.Search can filter results by words in a page titles, template names used, category membership, namespaces, or pages linking to a specific page. Search can handle regular expressions, a sophisticated, exact-string, and string-pattern, search tool that is not offered by most public search engines.Search has many features you need to know about in order to use it correctly:Search has some nice features you might like:The maximum query length is 300 characters.[2]The following features are available. They are activated by the syntax (characters) and operators (grammar) that form non-trivial items in multi-term queries.The main search operators are insource, prefix, intitle, incategory. These function as named filters, followed by a colon and their own search term. Their search term may be, as usual, a word, a phrase, and prefix takes a page name or the beginning letters of a pagename, as described below. These make up items in a query, and so they accept logical operators between them. A single “namespace:” filter can go first, and a single “prefix” filter can go last, as explained below.Note that the space characters are not very important, and that any character other than a letter of the alphabet or a number is treated as a space character. (The exception here the quotation marks used to make an exact phrase search). Basically all these characters !@#$%^%^&*()_+-=~`{}[]|\:;’<>,.?/ are ignored except to treat them as equivalent to a single space, so we may occasionally use the term grey-space instead of whitespace for the purposes of this page.The prefix and insource operators must “touch” their arguments, but others, such as intitle and incategory can have spaces between their colon character and there search term.Any non-alphanumeric character except double quotes are equivalent to a space character. Multiple spaces, and even mixes of spaces and non-alphanumeric characters are equivalent to a single space, and to AND. All filters can have between them such grey-space without effecting search results. The exceptions is for the “prefix” operator (and some syntactic versions of the “insource” operator), which must “touch” their arguments. Grey-space is accepted within and around logical terms, inside exact phrase searches, in between adjacent items in the query, and in starting characters of the search box query.All search words are automatically subject to stemming. If stemmed words are not wanted use double quotes around the word you do not want stemmed. Stems are a convention among search engines to garner more search results. See the following search link results for this page:Other search tools includeInternal search tools:External tools dedicated to Wikipedia Database searches include:
If you’re looking for a place where wine comes from pronounced “Bordo”, you can try searching for a more general article such as “Wine”, “Wine regions” (returning “List of wine-producing regions”) or other wine types such as “Burgundy” and see if it’s mentioned there or follow links (in this case, to “Burgundy wine”, which has several mentions of “Bordeaux”, and links to “French wine” and “Bordeaux wine”). If you know it’s in France, look at “France” or the Category:Cities in France, from where you can easily find Bordeaux. You can try various things depending upon the particular case; for “Bordo” wine, it’s quite likely that the first letters are “bord”, so search an article you’ve landed on for these letters. If you use Google to search Wikipedia, and click on “cache” at the bottom of any result in the search engine results page, you’ll see the word(s) that you searched for highlighted in context.For an overview of how to find and navigate Wikipedia content, see Portal:Contents. If you’re looking for a straight definition of a word, try our sister project Wiktionary.If there is no appropriate page on Wikipedia, consider creating a page, since you can edit Wikipedia right now. Or consider adding what you were looking for to the Requested articles page.If you have a question, then see Where to ask questions, which is a list of departments where our volunteers answer questions, any question you can possibly imagine.A common mistake is to type a question into the search bar and expect an answer; some Web search tools such as Ask Jeeves support this. The Wikipedia search is a text search only; questions, as such, can be asked at the reference desk and similar places. A search for how do clocks work? will return articles with the words how, do, clocks, and work, ignoring the question mark (in practice this can lead to articles answering simple questions).Because people like to see their work in search results, the search engine attempts to update in near real-time. Edits made to pages via templates can take a little longer to propagate. If you see the index lagging more than a day or so, report it. For other technical issues with the search engine, please leave a message on the talk page.