Help:Searching

Wikipedia uses a powerful search engine, with a search box on every page. The search box will navigate directly to a given page name upon an exact match. But, you can force it to show you other pages that include your search string by including a tilde character ~ anywhere in the query. The maximum search string is 300 characters long. However, search can instantly search all pages on the wiki when the search is kept to a simple word or two.

Wikipedia's searches can be made domain-specific (i.e., search in desired namespaces). The search engine also supports special characters and parameters to extend the power of searches and allow users to make their search strings more specific.

Advanced features of the Wikipedia search engine include multi-word proximity-searches (in which the user indicates how close the words in a phrase might be), wildcard searches, "fuzzy" ~ searches (handles typo-correction and questionable spelling), and several wiki-oriented operators and parameters for weighting and filtering. Search can also handle regular expressions, a sophisticated exact-string and string-pattern search tool that is not offered by most public search engines.

Search can also filter results by template names used, category membership, or pages linking to a specific page.

Special:Preferences offers several search options, and Wikipedia:Tools § Searching offers the setups of other users.

Search box


The search box is an input box with the term "Search Wikipedia" in it. In Wikipedia's default Vector skin, it is located in the top right corner of the screen. In the former default sink Monobook, it is in the middle of the sidebar on the left of the screen.

To use the search box, click in it, or jump to it, and type in your search string. To jump to the search box, "focus" your cursor to there by pressing.

In Vector, instead of a search button, there is an icon of a magnifying glass on the right-hand end of the search box. Pressing or clicking on the magnifying glass when the box is empty takes you directly to Wikipedia's search page.

If your search matches a page name the search box may instead of search. To get instead, prepend the tilde ~ character to the first word of the title. (Or choose "undefined" from the suggestions that drop down as you type.)

JavaScript and skins have an effect on the search/navigate default behavior. Monobook's default is to navigate, and Vector's default is search; however, when JavaScript is on, the Vector skin will navigate. Monobook's will navigate, and is the default, but Monobook has a  button.

Search string
Whatever you type into the search box is called the "search string". It may also be referred to as the "search query".

A basic search string is simply the topic you are interested in reading about. A direct match of a basic search string will navigate you directly to Wikipedia's article that has that title. A non-match, or any other type of search string will take you to Wikipedia's search results page, where the results of your search are displayed.

Terms in the search string are subject to stem matching, except for anything included between double quotation marks.

You can include in your search string special characters and parameters that activate specific search capabilities. Using any of these will take you to Wikipedia's search results page with the results of your search displayed.

The maximum search string is 300 characters long.

The format of the text that is entered is called search string syntax.

Search string syntax
Search is case insensitive, that is, upper and lowercase is ignored.

Search "folds" character families, matching similar-looking letters across alphabets, to match foreign terms. So, you don't have to type in diacritical letters, and your terms will still match. For example, a search on Citroen will also match Citroën, and Aeroskobing matches Ærøskøbing.

Characters that are not numbers or letters (punctuation marks, brackets and slashes, math and other symbols) are generally ignored. For example, Credit (finance) will return articles with the words credit and finance, ignoring the parentheses, unless an article with exact title  exists. Similarly, a search for the string LT (letters LT between two pipe symbols) will only return articles with lt. In order to search for terms that contain non-alphanumeric characters, a regex search must be used instead (using the \ escape character if required); for example, insource:/\ will successfully return all instances of undefined.

The source text is what is searched, which is not always what is displayed on the screen. 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  it is found searching for ecirc), etc.

Namespaces
The default search domain is the article space, but any namespace may be specified in a query.

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 page name.

Spaces
The use of spaces is, in general, intuitive. Unnecessary spaces, and all non-alphanumeric characters except  are ignored, which makes for flexibility; it is simplest and best to avoid typing unnecessary spaces, although the tolerance for grey space simplifies copying and pasting search terms without the need for cleanup. For example, credit card is obviously reasonable; copying and pasting Credit(?!)card is equivalent and convenient; "credit card""payment card" is actually correct and minimal, but "credit card" "payment card" is an intuitive equivalent.

Any of the following characters will be treated as a space character:. The double quotation mark  is not one of these characters, because it has the special purpose of specifying an exact phrase search, and   and   can be used to exclude results if either occurs at the beginning of a word or phrase (see more below). We use the term grey-space instead of whitespace here to include the space character itself and all these characters. Multiple [grey-]spaces are equivalent to a single space.

Grey-space is ignored between the words of exact-phrase searches, between adjacent items in the query, and in starting characters of the search box query. All filters can have grey-space between them without affecting search results. Most operators, such as  and , ignore unnecessary spaces, or grey-space, after the colon.

Where spaces are significant: single search terms cannot have embedded spaces; work space, "work space", and workspace are all different. The particular keywords  and   must be followed immediately by a colon   and their arguments, without intervening [grey-]spaces.

Special characters
For regex searches, see the  parameter below.

Double quotes for exact phrase search
A phrase can be matched by enclosing it in double quotes, "like this". Double quotes can define a single search term that contains spaces. For example, where the space is quoted as a character, differs much from  where the space is interpreted as a logical AND.

Suffixed tilde character for fuzzy search
Spelling relaxation is requested by suffixing a tilde ~, like this~ to match results like thus and thins. It covers any two character-changes for any character except the first: it returns addition, exchange, or subtraction. This search technique is sometimes called a "sounds-like" search. For example, searching for returns Charlie Parker, Charles Palmer, Charley Parks, etc.

Prefixed tilde character for forced search
To force a search rather than navigate directly to a matching page, include a tilde character ~ anywhere in the query. It always takes you to the search results page, never jumping to a single title. For example, the misspelling similiar is redirected to the Similarity article (or, in this case, disambiguation page); but prefixing a tilde,, lists pages containing that misspelling.

Prefixed hyphen or exclamation point for exclusion
Pages matching a search term can be excluded by prefixing an exclamation point (!) or a hyphen (-) to the term. This is the logical NOT. For example, finds all articles with credit and card  those with the phrase credit card.

Wildcard characters
The two wildcard characters are * and \?, and both can come in the middle or end of a word. The escaped question mark stands for one character and the star stands for any number of characters. Because many users ask questions when searching, question marks are ignored by default, and the escaped question mark (\?) must be used for a wildcard.

Non-alphabetic characters
For non-alphabetic characters, regex expressions are needed.

Logical operators
The search engine supports boolean logic in searches. Logical NOT (negation) can be indicated by a "-" (minus sign) or a "!" (exclamation point) character prefixed to a search term, or by the NOT keyword.

Parentheses (…) are ignored by the search engine and have no effect.

Search terms are implicitly joined by logical AND (conjunction). For example "credit card" housecat searches for pages containing both "credit card" and "housecat". An OR operator is supported, but will only give intuitive results (corresponding to logical disjunction) if all search terms are separated by OR (e.g. red OR green OR blue has the expected behaviour, but red OR green blue does not). OR also does not behave predictably with special keywords (like ) or namespaces.

Parameters
Parameters function as name filters, each followed by the search term it operates on. Their search term may be a word or a phrase. The main parameters are  ,  ,  ,  , and   (namespace as used here isn't literal – use the name of the actual namespace desired).

differs from the other parameters in that it can only be used at the end of a search string.

A single  filter can go first, and a single   filter can go last.

Only articles are searched by default because most users are only readers. Given only at the of the query, a namespace name followed by a colon limits search results to that namespace. It is a filter without a query string. The namespace can also be selected at Special:Search.

Namespace aliases like  or   instead of   are accepted.

will normally go directly to a user page even if it doesn't exist. To search userspace, use Special:Search or click "" below the search box.

will search all namespaces.

To search multiple namespaces but not all, use "" at Special:Search.

all:
Prefixing  (in lower case) searches all namespaces, sorted by namespace, and with substring matches at the end.

Page titles and redirects can be searched with, where query is the search string. The search results highlight occurrences in both the title and page content. Multiple  filters may be used to search for words in titles regardless of order, or in different titles (i.e., redirects) for the same article. Regular expressions can be used with  or the case insensitive.

This can find template arguments, URLs, links, html, etc. It has two forms, one is an indexed search, and the other is regex-based.

Given as incategory:category, where category is the page name of a category page, it lists pages assigned to the given category by methods including the addition of to their wikitext. (Editors searching in namespaces other than mainspace will need to know the limitations these search results may contain.) If the category page name includes space characters; replace the spaces with underscores (e.g. incategory:Pages_of_interest), surround the page name with double quotes (e.g. incategory:"Pages of interest") or both (but not on the Wikimedia Commons site). will also return pages in the adjacent subcategory. Multiple  filters may be applied. A more graphical alternative to a single filter is at Special:CategoryTree. Because categories are important structures for for related articles, any use of this prefix is particularly effective for searching.

Also, this allows you to search in a category and all its subcategories. The depth of the tree is currently limited to 5 levels, and the overall number of categories is limited to 256.

Examples:

patterns of a page name. Because the "beginning" characters can, if you need, go on to include the characters all the way to the end of the page name, prefix must include spaces, since page names often include spaces. For this reason  must only ever be given as the  of a search box query, and next character after the colon cannot be a space. does not search for partial namespace names, but requires at least a full namespace name to start to find pages, but  also recognizes an alias of a namespace, and it recognizes redirects (or shortcut). Prefix is the most widely used and powerful filter as it can mimic the namespace filter, and because  cannot easily target a single page, even together with other filters. Special:PrefixIndex is a MediaWiki, graphical, version, using only  to find pages.

searches in pages that link to the given page. Can be used negatively by prefixing a hyphen, which will return pages that link to the given page. Unlike with some other keywords, the page name is case-sensitive.

This limits searches to subpages of the specified page. You can also negate the subpages from a search by preceding subpageof: with a hyphen. Note that articles on Wikipedia don't have subpages, but the pages of the other namespaces do. Therefore, use the namespace parameter also, or select the namespace at Special:Search. Here are some examples:

For  searches, click "Search for pages containing" or use Special:Search. This is not needed for other namespaces. To look at all the subpages of a user, try this:

User:subpageof:AzaToth

That will display all the subpages of User:AzaToth. They can also be seen at Special:PrefixIndex/User:AzaToth/ but Special:PrefixIndex cannot be combined with a search.

To make sure Articles for deletion pages do not show up in the results of a Wikipedia namespace search, try this:

Wikipedia:"Hi there" -subpageof:"Articles for deletion"

That will show pages from the Wikipedia namespace with "Hi there" in them, and the list of results will not be cluttered with any WP:Articles for deletion debates (there are hundreds of thousands). Notice the use of the hyphen (that makes it mean "not subpages of").

This finds pages that use the specified Template|template. Input the canonical page name to find all usage of the template, but use any of its redirect page names finds just that naming. Namespace aliases are accepted, capitalization is entirely ignored, and redirects are found, all in one name-search.

This is more thorough than, in that it will find meta-templates (templates called by another template). Meta-templates don't show up in the local page's wikitext.

Example of  usage:

hastemplate:"Article for deletion/dated"

This lets you find all the articles being considered for deletion.

intitle:"Outline of " -hastemplate:"Outline footer"

This lets you find Wikipedia outlines that lack the outline footer template. (Notice the use of the hyphen to indicate "NOT").

This keyword allows filtering search results by topic. E.g. articletopic:books will filter the search results to articles about books. articletopic:books will filter to articles about books or films. articletopic:books articletopic:films will filter to articles which are about both books and films.

Only mainspace articles belong to topics. Unlike most other filters,  also does page weighting: articles which are a stronger match for a topic will be higher in the search results (while articles which aren't about that subject at all will be removed from the result set completely).

Topic models are derived via machine learning from ORES. Any given article receives a score on dozens of different topics, and therefore may appear under different keywords. For instance, the article on Albert Einstein may appear as a "physics" article and a "biography" article. Topic-related search data is updated weekly, so recently created articles might not show up in topic-based search queries.

Search page


The search page features a search box, with some links to search domains beneath it.

The main difference between this search box and the one that appears on article pages is that exact matches on this one will not navigate you directly to an article page. This search box will produce the search results page showing what all matches your search on Wikipedia.

To get to the search page, do an empty search (press while in the search box before typing anything else in), or click on the magnifying glass in the search box. The link Special:Search, which can be inserted onto user pages or project pages, for example, also leads to the search page.

While the entire contents of the search page is included in the search results page, it is a distinct page. User scripts might be designed to work on the search results page but not the search page, for example.

Search results page
The search results page looks just like the search page, with the results for your search query presented below it.

The search results page is displayed when a search is done from the search page, when a search from the regular search box does not exactly match a page title, or when any parameters or special characters are included in a search string.

Understanding search results
The search string entered will be displayed in the search box on the page, in case you wish to modify it.

Spelling corrections and query corrections are offered at the top of the results.

Note that search results include content from templates displayed on the pages searched.

The order that search results are presented in is based on the page ranking software.

Results match word stems, along with their various tenses (past tense, plural tense, etc.), except for anything included between double quotation marks.

Throughout the results, matching terms are highlighted in bold. All matches in the title show for sure, while matches within the details may show, but not if they are far apart on the page.

Matches are included for section headings, members of matching categories, and destination pages of redirects. These will show off to the side of the page name, parenthetically.

A single result (one each) from selected sister projects appears on the right side of the page (the most likely relevant match for each). This feature may be permanently turned off in Preferences.

Files from Wikimedia Commons are included within the results when the  namespace has been selected. You can prepend search terms with  to limit results to locally uploaded files.

Preliminary reports
Search 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 navigate 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): 
 * There is a page named "Page name" (a wikilink to an existing page)
 * Did you mean: spelling correction (either a wikilink or a search-link)
 * You may create the page "New title" (a redlink to a new page name)

Refining results
The Search page is designed for presenting and refining results in a re-search loop controlled by modifying the query or the search parameters, such as namespace.

Namespaces
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 selected using the checkboxes that appear when expanding the section labelled Search in: under the search box.
 * "": Only search encyclopedia articles (also called mainspace).
 * "": Search talk pages. Some discussions are in the  namespace, which can be included by also selecting "General help" (which also adds help pages) or by selecting "Wikipedia" under "".
 * "": Search the  namespace and   namespace (also called project namespace). The latter contains various types of pages including many help pages.
 * Unfortunarely, there is no reliable way to exclude discussion pages from the results, but you can try adding to your query -insource:/\(UTC\)/ (which would also exclude help pages containing "(UTC)"); or try something more delicate like this (which would also exclude help subpages of WikiProjects).
 * "": Search every page on the entire wiki, for example also drafts and user pages.

Click "" to select namespaces individually.

In order to fully interpret the search results page, check which search domains are checked off, but also remember to check for a namespace name at the beginning or a  parameter at the end of the search box query. A namespace entered in a query always takes priority for determination of the search domain of a query, and will at any time override your default search domain, or any displayed profile. A  parameter at  of a query in the search box, furthermore, will override any namespace there, or any profile underneath that. 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.

Sorting
By default, results are ordered by relevance. The "Sorting order" control in the "Advanced search" section allows you to select two other sort orders: most recently edited, and most recently created.

An advanced technique is to manually modify the URL to achieve other sort orders. For example, adding &sort=incoming_links_desc to the end of the URL will sort pages with the most incoming links to the top, and &sort=random will randomly order results. For a full list of available sort orders, see mw:Help:CirrusSearch.

Search settings
There is a tab. (You must be logged in.)

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 logged-in users can set their default search domain there by clicking "Remember selection for future searches".

Visit your page (requires JavaScript) to set up:
 * several external search engines' views of Wikipedia. The search results page will then have a pull down list to the left of its search box, offering your choice as, say, a modification of a word or phrase search, or a page ranking refinement. Go to Appearance, and see "Add a selector to the Wikipedia search page allowing the use of external search engines."
 * a wider search box. Go to Appearance and find "Widen the search box in the Vector skin."
 * . Spell-correct titles dropped-down from the search box as you type, or not. Or go to and see "Disable the suggestions dropdown-lists of the search fields".

The search results page can open in a new tab. See 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.)

To hide/opt-out the search results snippets from sister projects, go to and see "Do not show search results for sister projects on the search results page".

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, or on a Mac.

Searching for a specific person's contributions
Due to the way the wikimedia database is indexed, there's no direct way to search for something like insource:foo author:person. But, you can come close in some situations. If you're looking for something on a talk (or, sometimes, project) page, people tend to leave a signature after each edit, and such pages are usually set up so old edits roll off onto archive pages. In this case, the proximity search operator can find instances of your search term near the user's name. Something like foo person ~50 might find what you are looking for.

Search Wikipedia from any web page
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. This trick removes the need to first navigate to Wikipedia from a web page, and do the search or navigation. It is a temporary change, and then you put it back to your preferred web-search engine.

You can just drag items on the page the name up to the web browser search box, 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 prefixes in the web browser's search box. For example, you can go straight to a Wiktionary entry by using the prefix  from your web-search box.

SQL searches / Quarry
The entire wikipedia database (with some redactions for privacy) is exposed for SQL queries at the experimental Quarry service. Using this requires a high degree of technical skill; you must not only know SQL, but also be able to navigate the complex (and not always well documented) database schema. For those who are so equipped, it may provide another option for searches which would be impossible to do via the standard search interface.

Other search tools
Other search tools include:
 * Your own browser, to search the current page only. Try, , or.
 * https://www.wikipedia.org, to search other language editions of Wikipedia.
 * Search-related templates

Internal search tools:
 * ISBN
 * Prefix
 * And many other SpecialPages

External tools dedicated to Wikipedia Database searches include:
 * Article title grep: searches page titles using regular expressions. This search is much slower than standard search. In particular this tool can search for exact strings of characters, including punctuation and with case sensitivity. For example the pattern \(& Co\. Ltd\. will find only titles containing (& Co. Ltd. exactly as shown. Regular expressions are precisely defined, and not intuitively obvious.
 * PetScan: about 20 search parameters, three for categories
 * WikiBlame: search for text in the revision history of a page
 * User Contribution Search: reports anyone's contributions to a page
 * Edit summary search: search for text in anyone's edit summaries
 * whichsub: finds transcluded templates of a given page which contain a given string.

If you cannot find what you are looking for
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.

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 natural-language question into the search bar and expect an answer. While some Web search tools 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).

Delay in updating the search index
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.

Under the hood
To power its search feature, Wikipedia uses CirrusSearch, a MediaWiki extension that uses Elasticsearch to provide enhanced search features.

Stem matching
Search results will include the roots of words included in the search string, and their various tenses (plural, past-tense, etc.). If stem matching is not wanted, use double quotes around the word or phrase you want to match verbatim. Here are some examples: