Wikipedia talk:Searching/Archive 1

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Contents

Opera 8 Doesn't Work

I tried using the instructions for adding a Wikipedia Quick Shortcut to Opera 8, and it doesn't work at all. If I try typing in "w test" into my address bar, Opera tries to go to wtest.com.

Multilinugal Searching

For all people speaking more than one language, it would be a help if the search engine returns hits (no full text search, I think) from other languages, if no article is found. 192.33.101.239 14:23, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Google searching of the English Wikipedia

The search page's Google search form should be fixed to search en.wikipedia.org instead of www.wikipedia.org since most English pages are now indexed by Google at the new domain.

"self" not found

Why can't I find the word "self"? How is that badly formed?

see Wikipedia:Common words, searching for which is not possible, sorry. If you put in your browser [[[[www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ and your searchword, it will work. try http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self Fantasy 16:54, 13 Aug 2003 (UTC)
PS: Or use Google in combination with Wikipedia.

== ignoring words ==]]]] While length is not a useful way to decide what goes in the index, as above postings have made clear, certainly the most common words should be excluded. But why not just ignore such words rather than force the user to delete them and try again? Google does this, simply informing the user on the results page that "XXX is a very common word and was ignored." -- Michael Shulman


To do this, I've have to include the entire MySQL stoplist in the Wikipedia software itself. I'm not sure that's worth the effort. LDC

I come from the German wikipedia, and that language has, like many others, diacritical letters, which are often expressed by some other means, e.g. use 'ss' instead the sharp s 'ß', or 'ae' instead of 'ä'. The situation is similar in Spanish (e.g., á é í ó ú), ... Names are often written in the spelling of the original language (Perón of Argentina), or simply as Peron.

i think that is one error to change artcyclopedia , because before i was able to find , for example :DAUBIGNY , at all museums of the world, please don´t change painters online, is the better of i never have seen in internet, , http://www.guillermograndal.com ,


Thus it would be great to have 'equivalent characters', which permit a user to say 'o' and 'ó' are to be treated identical in this search.

Have there been any thoughts in this direction? -- Schewek

Yes, that's planned for the new improved search engine. I can't guarantee when this'll be ready, though. --Brion VIBBER

Searching for Down fails. But not all four-letter searches fail. I know there's an entry labeled Down, why does the search fail? -- Zoe

I've mentioned the arbitrary length to Lee on the mailing list; he agreed that it was a problem (consider these searches: malcolm x, george w bush, pi). Anyway, he promised to look into it. Koyaanis Qatsi 16:54 Jul 22, 2002 (PDT)

But why can I find blue, fire, cats, etc.? I can't find will, don't even know if that's an entry. It isn't a standard that all four-letter searches fail. What's the criterion? -- Zoe

You can find "blue", "fire", and "cats" just fine. And the new software produces useful results for "cat", "ct", and "pi". MySQL still won't index single letters, so "Malcolm X" does find "Malcolm X", but only because it finds every Malcolm. "Will" is a problem, because it is in MySQL stoplist, i.e., common words like "the" and "have" that are not indexed. That's the problem with "down" as well (though that makes a little less sense. I'm not sure what MySQL's criteria were for their stoplist). LDC

Oh, so you've fixed that already. I missed the announcement, sorry. Thanks for all your work, BTW. Koyaanis Qatsi

Will

Wrote a page on will. Also wrote a page on poverty, but I'm worried about the fact that Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Mswake 12:31 Jul 26, 2002 (PDT)

Funny to find discussion on will (which, btw, you still can't find by searching) because I can't access my article on free will by searching. What gives?

Phrases

Is there a way to search for phrases? Bob Jonkman

I don't really know about these things, so I won't do it myself, but should the link at the bottom of this page to Google reference wikipedia.org rather than wikipedia.com now? --Camembert

Nope - .org isn't completely indexed by Google yet. Compare "United States" site:www.wikipedia.org with "United States" site:www.wikipedia.com. Searching the .org address doesn't even find our United States article. --mav

Mozilla

Can anyone tell me exactly what to do to get mozilla to search wikipedia by default? --the semi-computer literate KQ

Add the Wikipedia (EN) search plugin, available at Mycroft site, then go to Edit->Preferences->Internet Search and make it your default plugin by selecting it from the dropdown list. :) --Unforgettableid | talk to me 05:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

British spelling

In order to make searching work reasonably, we have to be aware of American / British spelling differences. For example, if you search for "electronic colour code", you fail to find the article electronic color code, which was presumably originally written by a USAite. As the text is written, there is no conventient way to slip the word "colour" into the body of the text so that it gets found in a search.

I've tried adding text in html comments <!-- electronic colour code --> which seem to work as comments if on a line by themselves. but not if embedded mid paragraph. Search doesn't find them. Is there a way of adding "keywords" for searching to an article? Is there a way (like misspelling) of automatically making a search for either color or for colour actually search for "(color or colour)"? -- SGBailey 22:26 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Just make a redirect (as I just did) and mention the alternate spelling on the first line. Then searches will work. --mav
What you actually appear to have done is to create a new article electronic colour code which is a redirect to the US spelling and then have linked to the redirect from Talk:electronic color code to prevent it being an orphan. -- Fine. Which FAQ should this tit-bit of information go in? (I'm happy to put it there. -- SGBailey 22:57 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ (do a find on "American"). This FAQ does need help. Your other questions will have to be answered by a developer. --mav

What do we do for "significant" search keywords which are not in the article name? As an *example* if there was an articel 'Famous actors', we might have text "theater" in the article but want "theatre" to also work in searches. -- SGBailey 22:57 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)


Four color theorem

Another one on searches: Try searching for the four colour theorem: The following are rejected by SQL:

  • "four color ( theory or theorem )"
  • "( theory or theorem ) four color"
  • "( theory or theorem ) and four and color"

yet the follwoing work:

  • "( theory or theorem ) four and color"

Why? -- SGBailey 22:37 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

SQL requires each boolean word (and, or, (), not) separated by words being searched (non-boolean words). The format is boolean your words boolean your words boolean ....
ALL your first 3 failed searches didn't meet the criteria:
  • "four a boolean here color ( theory or theorem )"
  • "( theory or theorem ) four a boolean here color"
  • "( theory or theorem ) another word here and four and color"

Can the search engine developers confirm this? And for SGBailey, Try Wikipedia:Searching -- User:kt2

Short answer: the boolean magic in our search engine is very fragile; one of these days we're going to throw it out and replace it (possibly by upgrading to MySQL 4.0, which has built-in boolean magic in its fulltext search). Until then, boolean searching is more of an art than a science.
In this particular case, the "four" is causing trouble, as it's in MySQL's "stopword" list: it's one of a number of common words that it assumes won't bring useful search results, so they aren't indexed. The way our fragile search works does separate matches on each word and then ands/ors them together; searching a stopword thus gives _no_ results for that word's match, and for the 'and' common case gives a non-intuitive total result (ie, nothing!). So, we silently strip stopwords from your query before parsing it: thus "four color ( theory or theorem )" becomes "color (theory or theorem)". Note that 'and's are implicitly added most of the time, but parentheses muck up the works: search explicitly for "color and (theory or theorem)" and you'll get your man. --Brion 08:21 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)

Bottom-of-page search box

Hi!
I'm puzzled by the search box at the bottom of each page. There are two words (to the right of the box) SEARCH and GO. But they seem to do the same thing. I've never seen two words to choose from on any other web site.Please explain! Arpingstone 10:32 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

If you type the exact title of an article in the search box and hit the go button, you will be taken directly to the article. Whereas if you hit the search button you will be shown a list of pages containg the text. Mintguy

Problem

There seems to be something wrong with the search engine. Not a major functional problem - it's finding things all right - just with the way it's displaying the results. It used to be that each item on the search results list would have the article title followed by an extract from the article with the search term/s highlighted; what I'm getting now is the article title followed by 50 characters from each of the first five lines of the article, which isn't often very helpful. Does anybody know what's going on? -- Paul A, 4 Feb 2003 8:30 UTC

Side effect of a quick performance hack I added. I'll try to fix it. --Brion 08:34 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)

It also seems to be displaying things in a different order. In fact, I can't work out the logic of the order it's displaying things at all. For example, I just searched for Lou Harrison, and the first fourteen article text results had "Lou" and "Harrison" in them, but not the whole phrase "Lou Harrison". As a result, a lot of irrelevant stuff is given prominence. Sorry if this has been brought up somewhere else, I've not spotted it. --Camembert

Actually, now I check again, many (maybe even all) of those first 14 results don't have "Lou" in them at all, just "Harrison". --Camembert 20:21 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)
Searching for phrases is unfortunately not possible, and additionally Boolean "and" search has temporarily been disabled. Now there is no point in putting "Lou Harrison" in the search box, is works as "or". Choose "Lou" or "Harrison", whichever you think occurs less, to minimize the number of undesired results. - Patrick 13:10 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)
Ah, I didn't realise that "AND"s were no longer being quietly inserted between search terms and that Boolean searches were in any case disabled. However, this meta page says "Results with all terms will be returned preferably, but partial results should show up as well, further down in the list", but this isn't what is happening - results are just getting mixed up in any old order, so that reults with all terms might be at the bottom of the list. But anyway, if full functionality will be restored in time, that's fine. --Camembert

Acapedia

rm acapedia, because the cached version redirects to the current wikipedia version for some links - MyRedDice

What do you mean? Google caches a 2nd copy of wikipedia articles through acapedia, as far as I have seen, and a better one: it does not have the problem that Google text interferes with the top of the article text. - Patrick 22:30 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)

I went through a few links from such a google search, and I clicked on the "Cached" link, and I found myself redirected to the live, non-cached, wikipedia page. For example, click on the "Cached" link here.

It seems you have searched the whole web for the term "acapedia", but you have to search acapedia (take my link) for some other term, for example "rijngouwelijn". Then you get http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cof=&domains=acapedia.org&q=rijngouwelijn&btnG=Google+Search&sitesearch=acapedia.org

The second cached result is

http://216.239.39.100/custom?q=cache:PZohTDY8i6QC:acapedia.org/aca/Light_rail+rijngouwelijn&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

which is better than

http://216.239.39.100/custom?q=cache:kkgOR6oDp00C:www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar+rijngouwelijn&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Congratulations

Congratulations on making the wikipedia totally unusable in all practical respects. If you can't search the database then what's the point in having one? I'm not going to bother writing article when nobody can find them for a month. Goodbye. KJ 01:12 Apr 4, 2003 (UTC)

The search function has been disabled during peak hours because of performance problems - the idea is that if it's left fully functioning, the database grounds to a halt and cannot be used at all. Having no up-to-date search function for much of the day is indeed annoying, but having no working database whatsoever would be even worse.
This is very much a temporary thing, and the problem is being worked on - apart from ongoing efforts to improve the performance of the site in general, there's supposed to be a new server being installed which, if I understand things correctly, is going to make the search function available once more. Come back when it's up and working again, won't you? It'd be a shame to lose you. --Camembert
By the way - if you know the name of the article you want to go to, you can type it in the search box and hit "Go" - that function is still working. --Camembert

Wikipedia namespace

It would be good if the wikipedia namespace would be included in the titles search when Wikipedia's internal full-text search facility is temporarily disabled.

Even when Wikipedia's internal full-text search facility is on, a title search option would be useful (faster if here are many hits in the full text).

Patrick 12:04 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

Search page too complicated

I think this page is overly complicated, and the striked paragraphs make it even more confusing

A simple rewrite would be based on examples, possibly similar to the How to edit a page page.. I will try to simplify it.. -- Rotem Dan 21:22 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)


Curious - shouldn't we search using bomis.com, since they're kind enough to provide us hosting?

Search broken

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump

Is it just me, or is search completely broken at the moment (ie. returning no article title matches for keywords that I know should have matches)? --rbrwr

It's not just you, that's for sure. -- John Owens
I went ahead and disabled the title search yesterday so I could actually get at pages with less than a fifteen minute wait. Selfish of me, I know. --Brion
Well, it doesn't seem to be working very well anyway, as a fix for that. ;) -- John Owens 19:26 Apr 22, 2003 (UTC)


Why not tie the search directly into Google, instead of letting users think nothing has been found for their search? Cgs
Agreed; search directly into google, or at least have some sort of notification on the results page that title search has been disabled rather than just saying "no results found"... it took me almost two days of "gee, why isn't there an article about that??" before I realized what was going on. :) kwertii
Ugh! Yes, either fix the title seach or label it as broken, please! Logotu 20:41 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)
I figured out that the title search was broken purely because it was telling me that there were no article title matches for articles that I knew perfectly well were already there. I'm just glad Tim Starling told me about a couple of workarounds that I could use instead, like the "Go" button and the Google search--though I still prefer the article title search. I can do without the article text search, but I did miss not being able to search titles! Susurrus 08:58 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC+10)
I always use google search now, even when wikipedia search is active. It's much faster, and it provides better control over AND vs OR, and similar things. I'll sacrifice up-to-the-minute search info for those benefits... Martin 23:36 Apr 28, 2003 (UTC)

Go button

Why is it that when I click the "go" button, it almost invariably takes me to the Talk page instead of to the article page? -- Zoe

I'm not able to reproduce this with a few random search words. Can you give some examples of words which do produce this effect? Is it consistent with the same word? --Brion 02:43 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
If the Go button finds no direct match with the exact title you entered (in some capitalization variants), it does a namespace-independent nearest title match. If the first title match is in the talk namespace, this is what it shows. That basically depends on the storage order in the database, which is more or less random. A smarter behavior might be to do another title match search for an article in another namespace until it finds one, and only display the talk namespace if there is none, but that would also mean more tries -- more queries -- less performance. Probably not significantly less, though. Eloquence 03:01 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
Ahh, that would be a problem particularly for pages which had been deleted and recreated, or renamed. Would tossing an "ORDER BY cur_namespace" in the query help? This would preferentially return the pages from non-talk namespaces in nearly all circumstances. That might mess up the search results order, though. Perhaps simply upping the LIMIT so the single query returns several results, which we pick through ourselves? --Brion 03:26 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
Yes, the manual-picking-through seems to be the only reliable way to do it -- we don't want to lose MySQL's relevance sorting. --Eloquence 03:58 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
I never even notice the Go button before. Kingturtle 03:03 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

Stopwords in titles??

The list of words not used in searches seems reasonable for words IN articles. Is there anyway that the search of article TITLES could use ALL words? -- 217.24.129.50

When we upgrade MySQL to version 4 (which has much better fulltext search capabilities, including exact phrase searching), we'll try to reduce or remove the stopword list. This'll have to wait a bit, as the last couple of revisions have had bugs which specifically affect types of queries that we use. --Brion 17:34 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

searching for worcester

I'd like an easy way to search for articles containing the text "worcester" that do not link to Worcester, England, Worcester, Worcestershire, etc, so that I can link them properly (if relevant, of course). Is there any way to do this? Martin 18:45 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

What I do in such a case is change my preferences for "Lines to show per hit:" (under "Search result settings:") from the default 5 (I think it is) to something like 150. This means it will return every hit in the first 150 lines of the article, instead of the first 5 lines. Unfortunately this preference has a rather unintuitive name. You'd think that if there were 5 hits in an article, then it would display all of them in the default setting, but rather it only returns the ones in the first 5 lines. It is then easy to read whether the text "worcester" is part of a link or not. I don't know whether this taxes the server too much, but maybe someone in the know would like to comment. --snoyes 22:33 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)
snoyes, you are a star. Thanks! Martin


Typo

There is a typo on the search stub page that is in place while searching is disabled: "perfromance". I assume that text isn't accessible to ordinary Wikipedians, but if it is, just let me know how and I'll fix it. -- Jketola 21:05, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)

The search is up, Watson?

Full-text search is back up, with no apparent slowing of the server - what happened? Did a bug just get fixed? -Smack 05:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

See announcement on the mailing list. Search is temporarily running off a copy of the search index table on the other server. It's a static copy so it will slowly become more and more out of date. --Brion 06:25, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Will it ever be updated? -Smack 06:32, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
To reiterate: "temporarily". --Brion 06:38, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Ah, yes. I missed that. But then what? -Smack 06:47, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Quote from above-linked message: "I'd prefer to be running these sorts of things on a third machine, capable of being a full live backup database server, but we don't yet have one." --Brion 07:05, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thank you for bringing full-text search back, but there are some strange problems. If you type "west nile virus" or "history of germany" and click on "Search", then the desired result (article of exactly this name) is not displayed in the first place. The article West Nile virus is the 49th hit to be displayed. This may be a weak example, since you can access the article by clicking GO, but shouldn't the search function find articles with occurrences of all words first? Sorry, if this should have been discussed before. -- Cordyph 10:11, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
See section "limiting results" in Wikipedia:Searching. --Brion 10:16, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thank you. Sorry for asking the same questions again and again, but it is almost impossible to observe all articles in the Wikipedia namespace. -- Cordyph 10:19, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

search is not case sensitive

Can't you make searches non-case sensitive by default? Phys

have a look at Wikipedia:Searching#Search_is_case-insensitive, Fantasy 20:46, 13 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Search is not case-insensitive when there are capitalized words in the article title. For example, searching for 'nuts in may' returns no results even though the article with title 'Nuts in May' does exist. Surely it would be desirable to return this article as a match under these circumstances. Koyna

Can't search abbreviations

Searching for abbreviations, such as "MP3" or "USA" doesn't work. Why is this?

short word don't work, see Wikipedia:Searching#Avoid_short_and_common_words, sorry.
Try instead by just typing in the URL directly:
Hope this helps, Fantasy 08:30, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll remember that, though I still think this search engine desperately needs revising.

Search is disabled?

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, September 25th, 2003.

So when is it coming back? Wikipedia is virtually unusable without some kind of search capability. Even a link to Google would be nice, like the last time. RickK 19:47, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It'd be useful. But until they link Google, try adding site:wikipedia.org to your Google search. --Menchi 19:53, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Google search form is back. --Brion 20:18, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Server overloads?

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, October 9th, 2003.

Why do I get so many 'server overloads' when I try searching for any article? It would seem to me that the problem may be lack of bandwidth. If that is the problem then why is it not being dealt with?

The 'go' function will take you to a page if it finds an exact match, but text search is disabled entirely pending server upgrades. --Brion 11:24, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC)
"If that is the problem then why is it not being dealt with?" People can't pull new servers out of thin air. If you want to contribute got to [1]. CGS 14:14, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC).

Where do searches go?

This is probably a simple data error, but I don't yet know how to fix it myself: When I enter "ct scan" in Wikipedia's mini-search bar I end up on "Ultrasound scan" (a related but different subject). There is a much more relevant page available, computed_axial_tomography. Searching for "CT scan" takes me there. Is it possible for a mere site-visitor to change where a search will take me? --195.22.85.154 14:43, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Weird, when I enter "CT scan" (CT in caps) I get redirected to Computed axial tomography from CT scan, in lower case I get the same result as you do &mdash even though there is no ct scan. Strange. Anyway, you can also press on "search" instead of "go" and you can do a proper search for the words you entered. --snoyes 15:32, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Heh, it happens because of #redirect. Ultrasound scan which redirects to Medical ultrasonography contains both "CT" (as the ending of #REDIRECT) and "scan". So, that's what it finds :) Maybe stuff like #redirect should be excluded from searches? Zocky 15:40, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Yes, it is possible. Just create a wikipedia:redirect. Martin 23:16, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)


Search Log

Back before the Wiki Search was taken down, there used to be a Search log, where we could see what things people were searching for. Is that still available? RickK 06:32, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That was taken out in mid-2002. It wasn't really directly usable for clicking to create articles as most of the entries were misspellings and/or not exact titles (lowercase, missing articles, with extra terms for 'search engine' style). Further, I don't think most people expect that typing something into a search engine will record their query publicly for posterity. There are privacy issues. --Brion 08:50, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)
That's too bad. I would think a log ranking search phrases by number of times it was queried would be helpful in creating useful redirects, or renaming pages, or indeed creating new articles. Even the mispelling information seems potentiall useful. I don't see why it has to be a privacy concern if no user information is associated with a term. Callistan 20:49, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Search disabled permanently?

Is the text search of Wikipedia permeanently disabled? Every single time I go to use it, it says:

"Sorry! Full text search has been disabled temporarily, for performance reasons. In the meantime, you can use the Google or Yahoo! searches below. Note that their copies of Wikipedia content may be out of date."

Or am I doing something wrong? LUDRAMAN | T 17:31, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It was disabled prior to the arrival of the new (fast) servers, but has not been re-enabled. — Jor (Talk) 17:37, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)


More specifically, (as I understand it) the search was intended to use the one server which wasn't replaced, and is still awaiting return from repairs. - IMSoP 01:19, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Rumour has it the old server is repaired and will be installed on Saturday. I don't think this guarantees the search will be back on though. Angela. 21:03, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)
Update: that server still has problems. See the Geoffrin woes thread on Wikitech-l. Angela. 18:11, Apr 6, 2004 (UTC)

Case-Sensitive Questions

As I understand it, search is supposed to be case-insensitive, as referenced in Wikipedia:Searching#Search_is_case-insensitive -- but when I search for "dj leslie", the DJ leslie entry doesn't come up. Am I missing something, or should I make a bug report? -- Twiin 15:22, 05 May, 2004 (UTC)

I am finding the same problem University of York is not found by a search for 'University Of York' or 'university of york', and some articles have re-directs to deal with this such as Morse code and 'Morse Code' --John Bracegirdle 21:12, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
Search is case-insensitive, but searching is currently disabled. The Go button treats cases differently to the search option; it goes through six stages trying various capitalisation options before taking you to a page. See Wikipedia:Go button for full details. Angela. 07:31, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Full-text search working

Full-text search appears to be working again, thanks to the new hardware. Very nice. Perhaps an announcement on Wikipedia:Announcements should be in order? - Plutor 19:27, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've updated the project page accordingly. --Diberri | Talk 04:17, Jun 24, 2004 (UTC)


Google search

I miss the google search box, can we have that back as well as the wikipedia searching? Spare a thought for those who can't spell well Dmn 17:30, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Seconded. I too prefer the google search (which is sorted by relevance) to the page text search (but I still prefer Wikipedia's article title search). Having both Wikipedia's builtin search (title and page text) and the google search box would be the best of both worlds. cesarb 20:58, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Where is the google search??? It was so much better... Sam [Spade] 21:46, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Grr, I hate this search thing. Bring back google. See what happens when I typed Hilary Clinton instead of Hillary [2]. This isn't fair on those who can't spell well  :-(( 62.49.5.21 23:17, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Like me! :D Sam [Spade] 23:19, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Bring back the Google box. It made researching copyvios so much easier. - Tεxτurε 19:49, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Here is your Google box: Now stop whining :) Adam Bishop 00:33, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps you misunderstand? I like how I could so quickly find articles w similar words, yet w different spellings, etc.. The old way of searching was just so handy, and the new way... not :*( Sam [Spade] 00:46, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I, for one, am extremely happy to see our own search engine back. Although it does have some faults, and Google is still very useful for searching outside sources, our own handy engine is much more useful for searching out misspellings, or finding out what needs linking. I commend the developers for bringing it back. Eclecticology 04:11, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Thanks heaps to those responsible for getting Wikipedia's full text search facilities back online; I've recently been comparing Britannica Online to Wikipedia, and (apart from reliability of servers), text search was the only real big technical advantage they have. Having said that, I would support having a Google search option linked to from our native search; sometimes Google searches have their advantages. — Matt 17:51, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Exactly, I didn't mean to say it's bad to have the full text thing, I just don't prefer it in exclusion of the old google option. Google is more handy for finding similar spellings of a given search. Sam [Spade] 04:53, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This is driving me crazy, please give us a little google search box as well - i spend 10 minutes looking for Laser Dmn 20:35, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say! Sam [Spade] 20:39, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia Lookups from IE Address Bar

I've discovered a cool way to directly go to Wikipedia articles from the IE address bar in Windows XP. First go here and download TweakUI.exe on the right-hand side:

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP

Install it and then run it. Open the Internet Explorer node on the left side, then click Search. Click the Create button, and enter these in the fields:

 Prefix: wp
 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:search?search=%s&go=Go

For the politically-minded of us, you can create a similar shortcut for going to Wikipedia namespace articles, like this:

 Prefix: wpw
 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:search?search=Wikipedia: %s&go=Go

Then you can type, for example, "wp Wikipedia" in the address bar to visit the article on Wikipedia, or "wpw Village pump", for this page.

Deco 05:12, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

That's cool! --Yacht (talk) 05:50, Jul 11, 2004 (UTC)


...and from Mozilla

How to do the same thing in Mozilla, Firefox, etc.:

  • Choose "Manage Bookmarks" from the Bookmarks menu.
  • Press "New Bookmark".
  • Fill in the Location field with one of the URLs given above (exactly the same format).
  • Fill in the Keyword field with the prefix you want, e.g. wp.
  • Press OK, and close the Bookmarks Manager.

That's it-- you don't need to download anything. Marnanel 16:51, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Or, at least with Firefox, you can go to the link that says "Add engines" in the pull-down menu on the search bar. Just search for Wikipedia and add it to the bar.  – Jrdioko (Talk) 01:12, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The Go, the Search, and the Ugly

Today is July 26, 2004 and I wanted to search the Wikipedia: namespace for articles on identity and anonymity. So I typed "anonymity" in the search box (I use the monobook skin) and clicked "Search" (not "Go"). This gave me a "Search results" page with dozens of irrelevant hits, most of which are not in the Wikipedia: namespace. But this was ok. At the bottom of the page was the form that I was looking for. I unchecked the Main namespace and all other namespaces and only checked the Wikipedia: namespace. In this form, there was no "Go" button, only a "Search" button. So I clicked it. And I immediately landed on the Main:Anonymity page, as if I had clicked a "Go" button. It turns out that the first HTML form had two <input type=submit> buttons. One with value=Go name=go and the other with value=Search name=fulltext. But the HTML form at the bottom of the Search results page had only one <input type=submit> button, featuring value=Search name=searchx. I think this "searchx" should be "fulltext" and that there should be a "go" button next to it. -- LA2 26 Jul 2004

Default search

Does anyone know why the default search (i.e. punching something into the text field and hitting "Search") searches Template Talk? --Ben Brockert 21:55, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)

Hello?

Wikipedia_talk:Searching#Google_search seems to have a concensus of "lets bring back the google search". Sam [Spade] 23:32, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I tried adding the Google form to MediaWiki:Powersearchtext but it didn't work correctly. If you want the form added, can you suggest how and where it should be added please. The old Google form will only work when searching is disabled. Angela. 22:18, Aug 11, 2004 (UTC)
Please bring it back. I'm dying here :-( Dmn / Դմն 23:25, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Yay, google is back. Long live google search. Dmn / Դմն 19:15, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

People are always quick to moan about what they've lost, but not so quick to cheer for what they've got. Is there any way of still using the Wikipedia search? It was always great for searching the wiki coding on each page. I now miss that.
SimonMayer 13:59, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The full-text search is still available (at least it was yesterday). I recall that it was disabled during peak times, however, but I can't find the reference. --Diberri | Talk 15:18, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)

That is ok then. I was just concerned that we'd lost something important, but if it's on at late night, I'll cope.
SimonMayer 16:24, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Tools

I am currently, together with User:Sj, establishing the page Wikipedia:Tools. The goal is to given an overview of tools for browsing and editing the wikipedia. I would suggest to integrate some parts of this page into Wikipedia:Tools and link to that page here. Anyhow, it is important to coordinate the contents of this two pages, to avoid overlap and confusion. -- 217.82.181.205 23:57, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC) 23:34, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC) (that is de:Benutzer:Duesentrieb)

Search availability randomness

Why is it that the search function seems to be randomly disabled and enabled every day? One moment it works, then later the same day it just offers the Google/Yahoo search. Is this an automatic load-dependent regulation? Gzornenplatz 15:35, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)

"Search Wikipedia from a sidebar tab" removed - base64 is not readable enough to be safe

I removed this section because telling people to run a block of unreadable base64 code is not safe or wise. I don't have Firefox or Opera, so I can't test it, but when I un-base64'd and un-percent-quoted it, it didn't seem to have any problems, but still, since data scheme url's don't need to be in base64 it is better for readability for them not to be. Please find some safer way to write this; it is a good thing to have.

===Search Wikipedia from a sidebar tab===
Works with: Mozilla Firefox, Opera 7.

Wikipedia can also be searched via a sidebar tab of its own. To install the tab, copy the text below into the web address bar and press Enter, then click "Add Sidebar":

 data:text/html;base64,PGEgcmVsPXNpZGViYXIgdGl0bGU9IlNlYXJjaCBXaWtpcGVkaWE
 iIGhyZWY9ImRhdGE6dGV4dC9odG1sLCUzQ2Jhc2UlMjBocmVmJTNEJTIyaHR0cCUzQSUyRiUy
 RmVuLndpa2lwZWRpYS5vcmclMjIlM0UlM0NsaW5rJTIwcmVsJTNEc3R5bGVzaGVldCUyMGhyZ
 WYlM0QlMjJzdHlsZSUyRm1vbm9ib29rJTJGbWFpbi5jc3MlMjIlM0UlM0NoMSUzRVdpa2lwZW
 RpYSUzQyUyRmgxJTNFJTNDZm9ybSUyMGFjdGlvbiUzRCUyMndpa2klMkZTcGVjaWFsJTNBU2V
 hcmNoJTIyJTIwdGFyZ2V0JTNEJTIyX2NvbnRlbnQlMjIlM0UlM0NoNCUzRVNlYXJjaCUzQyUy
 Rmg0JTNFJTNDaW5wdXQlMjBuYW1lJTNEc2VhcmNoJTNFJTNDJTJGZm9ybSUzRSI%2BQWRkIFN
 pZGViYXI8L2E%2B

JesseW 02:07, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I encoded it as base-64 so that there was no issue with line wrapping, and it's not much more readable using quoted printable encoding. It's probably best if I move it to my own website and simply link to it. --Carey Evans
Ah! That makes a lot of sense. I have some bookmarklets I list on my User page, that are pretty unusable by direct copying due to this problem. Moving it to your own site would work, since that way people can at least know they only have to trust you, not any random wikipedia vandal. Thanks for taking the criticism well, and thanks for writing the sidebar tab. JesseW 10:25, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Recommendation

Clicking "Search" without entering any text should take you to an advanced seach screen (with the ability to limit by namespaces, etc.; the same screen you get when you type something in to search) rather than an oblique database error message. -Fastfission 05:39, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

CDNOW

I have a proposal for a policy improvement; people who are looking for music-related information to make an article about should use CDNOW to find out about music albums and their notability. There is an article about a famous album series that is full of redlinks and hasn't been improved for so many months; click Jock Jams and improve it in any way you can. --SuperDude 04:49, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

Font size in firefox

The search snippets are surrounded by 'small' tags, which are tiny and almost unreadable in the firefox browser. Are other people getting this? --Quiddity 09:04, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How long before article can be found using Search?

I've been developing a page for a few weeks now, but neither the wiki- search nor Google can find it, using terms one might use to find such a page, or even searching for the specific name. If neither search engine can find the page, someone looking for information there would only find it if they happened upon a link on another page.

Is this because the page has only been started recently? How long before the searches will find the page? It doesn't make sense to me that there would be a time delay, but I cannot figure out any other explanation. Can someone explain? Thanks, Laszlo Panaflex 23:30, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

Redirects

How often is it that you search for something but the good answers droown in redirected pages? My idea: figure out some way (at least give the option) to eliminate all redirected pages from searches. HereToHelp 23:10, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Good idea. -- Ec5618 17:43, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Simple search

While this page explains searching Wikipedia in full, it might be helpful if some simplified version were available, for new users in particular. If no-one objects I'd like to create a stub, at least. -- Ec5618 17:43, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

ignore diacritics

I am admin at the lingála wiki and I am contributor at the german and alemanic wikis. There is a problem with the search engin. When I cannot write the diacritics (as a user) or the use of diacritics is not know to all the users (not in german, french or english, but in alot of not teached languages (p.ex. kikongo, lingala, ciluba, kiswahili, ....), I cannot find an article. Example from the german wiki: If I search lingala, I am linked to the article Lingala. When I use the lingala spelling of lingala lingála there is one 7%-result (list of languages of the world). Example from the lingála wikipedia: If you are congolese and you don't no how to type ɔ and ɔ́ you cannot find the article about your country in your language: Kɔ́ngɔ - even there is in some older dictionarries the spelling Kongó. Well there is a possibility to make for each article 4 or 5 redirects with different spellings. In german there is a redirect from Fluß to Fluss, but one from Strasse to Straße. There is obviously no rule (in Germany and Austria: Fluß, Straße; in Switzerland and Liechtenstein Fluss, Strasse). If the wiki search engine could learn that letters with and withou diacritics are (more ore less) the same, that ɔ, ss and ɛ are similar than o, ß and e, it would be grat and very helpful.

  • o search also ö ó ô ǒ ɔ ɔ́ ɔ̂ ɔ̌
  • e search also ë é è ê ɛ ɛ́ ɛ̂ ɛ̌
  • a search also ä á â ǎ
  • u search also ü ú û ǔ
  • i search also ï í î ǐ
  • ss search also ß
  • ß search also ss

--Etienne 14:46, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

poor searches

the search engine is very poor. a search for "Swallowed in the Sea", a song from coldplay, is nowhere in the first 10 results. 59.93.129.176 16:50, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

There is no article by that name. You may be looking for X&Y or Twisted Logic Tour, both of which mention the song. -- Ec5618 17:05, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikimedia-Search

If you want, you can added this:

  • Wikimedia-Search search the realtime index for every project with suggest function

Articles I've created can not be found via search engine !?!

I've created a couple of articles such as Aleksandr Zinovyev, Mikhail Meltyukhov, Leonid Stolovich and Wilhelm Külz. But to my great astonishment, I recently discovered that none of them can be found by searching (if I just type the name of the article and press GO, then, of course it works, but if I press SEARCH, nothing is found). What's the matter??? Constanz - Talk 10:46, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

The Wikipedia search utility hasn't updated yet, which is why the full text search won't work. A simple 'go' search however locates a file matching the exact search query, and returns the right result. The project page intro explains it all. -- Ec5618 13:17, 29 January 2006 (UTC)


This is not the place to ask questions. Please see Wikipedia:Look it up if the article is confusing.

infertility

if all tests are normal why pregnency is not occuring?

estado moderno

Articles for deletion?

It appears that the discussions of articles nominated for deletion are saved somewhere. How can I search for past article-for-deletion discussions? Kestenbaum 21:57, 17 February 2006 (UTC)


Search box on this page?

The new version of the front page will have a link called "Searching" to here, Wikipedia:Search. Because it now seems unlikely that a search box will be placed prominently on the new Main Page, a certain percentage of people, trying to search but not seeing the box on the left, will click on "Searching" and get to this page. Because of that, I think it makes sense for the top of this page to include a large and prominent search box, above the "Wikipedia contains articles..." paragraph. Any thoughts? zafiroblue05 | Talk 02:13, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea to me. It could definately be helpful for those poor lost and confused individuals. --Paulie Peña 02:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Is the term "bookmarklets" used correctly?

I always thought that bookmarklets were javascript code in a bookmark (the Bookmarklet wikipedia article says as much) and that the those Mozilla and other Gecko browsers called their keyword searches "Quicksearches." Therefore, shouldn't we change the headline "Search Wikipedia using a bookmarklet" to "Search Wikipedia using a Quicksearch" and mention "bookmarklets" under the "Javascript in Bookmarks" headline? Does anyone agree or disagree? --Paulie Peña 02:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Further discussion..

Please see Main Page/Development for more discussion on this page's current development. --Quiddity 01:00, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Search result page option?

Newbie question, sorry if it has been answered somewhere ... By default, it seems the searching returns the page with exact name (if exists) that matches the search text. Is there any preference setting to always return the list of all pages with names containing the search text instead? Thanks. --Elo0000 23:11, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

  • The "Go" button under the search box (or hitting enter) will take you the exact match, if it exists. However, the "Search" button will give you the list of pages with the keyword you entered. I'm not sure of any preferences that would make hitting enter give you the search results list, but hope the search button will do. --Aude (talk | contribs) 23:28, 22 March 2006 (UTC)


How can Wikipedia be so awesome but have such a sucky search?

Comments?

Intergrate Google as the wiki search

Why doesn't Wikipedia integrate the Google search into the Wikipedia search function? Honestly, the search function is far and away the facet of Wikipedia that I have the most trouble with...Google offeres the "Did you mean to search..." function as well as the ability to find phrases, etc., etc., etc. Bottom line is that it's much better though...Anyone have any thoughts/ideas/answers? Jarfingle 09:54, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

It is at least an informal policy of the Wikimedia Foundation (which provides the money to the run the servers) to use open source software. Google search is not open source. I agree an exception could/should be thought about in this case. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:58, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
I agree, the Wikipedia search is horrendous and Wikipedia would be infinitely times more useful and beneficial to society if the search yielded the correct results... the case sensitive thing is absolutely ridiculous... I think that if the community voted on a measure that would implement the Google search it would pass with nearly 100% of the vote... Hoopydink 13:03, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I

Gotcha, is there a protal for requesting exceptions be made somewhere? I'd like to do what I can to change this... Jarfingle 03:35, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Contact information for the Foundation is at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Contact_us. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:17, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Not seeing any "List redirects" tickbox

The project page says that users can "Check or uncheck the tickbox 'List redirects' ... at the bottom of a search results page" but I'm not seeing any such box. Has this feature been removed? —Chris Chittleborough 01:12, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I've never seen such a feature, although it's a great idea. I'll remove it from the page. Melchoir 22:16, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Hmm... looks like the comment dates from September 2002. I certainly wasn't around then... maybe there was such a feature. Melchoir 22:21, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
There's a request for this feature in mediaZilla — see item #3174. (I've experimented with adding -"#redirect" to search strings, but it doesn't seem to help.) Oh, well. CWC(talk) 00:52, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

search engine link

what's up with the search engine link? it says that you are going to a page that is not involved with wikipedia, yet when you click on it, it takes you to another page on wikipedia. please fix. ill attempt to fix it........ - Bagel7

definition of "self"

Person within and attached to a particular body