CS Knowledge Base

The search box on every page accesses the internal search engine. It will navigate directly to a given page name upon an exact match. You can force it to show you other pages that include your search string by including a tilde character ~ before the first term of a query. The maximum search string is 300 characters long.^[a] However, search can instantly search all 66,449,944 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.

The search box is an input box with the placeholder text "Search Wikipedia" in it. In Wikipedia's default Vector 2022 skin, it is located in the header of the page at the top of the screen.

To use the search box, click in it, or jump to it by pressing ⇧ Shift+Alt+F, and type in your search string. Then, either click ↵ Enter, or the Search button.

If your search matches a page name exactly, search will navigate to the page directly instead of showing search results. To get search results instead, prepend or end a word of the search string (i.e., the page name) with a tilde ("~"). (Or choose "Search for pages containing" from the suggestions that drop down as you type.)

In the former default skin Vector, the search box is located in the top right hand corner, and instead of a search button, there is an icon of a magnifying glass on the right-hand end of the search box. Pressing ↵ Enter or clicking on the magnifying glass when the box is empty takes you directly to Wikipedia's search page. Prior to that, in Monobook it was in the middle of the sidebar on the left of the screen.

JavaScript, and thus possibly user scripts, 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 Go will navigate, and is the default, but Monobook has a Search button.

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.^[a]

The format of the text that is entered is called 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 Credit (finance) 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:/\|LT\|/ will successfully return all instances of |LT|.

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 ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc.