Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Appendixes/Reader's guide to Wikipedia: Difference between revisions

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{{WTMM-note|If you click "Search", for curiosity's sake, you'll just get some so-so search results. For example, if you search for ''Reagan wife'', the article ''[[Nancy Reagan]]'' shows up 2nd and ''[[Jane Wyman]]'' shows up 17th. Worse, the context Wikipedia's result page shows is terrible. With a Google search, by contrast, you can get these two names from the context shown for the first result without even having to click a link.}}

[[File:Wikipedia-The MissingSearch Manual_I_mediaobject_d1e29485Screenshot.png|frame|center|'''Figure B-3''' When Wikipedia can't find an exact match to a Gosearch request, it provides search results, but it also offers a link to create an article with the same name as the word or phrase you entered.]]

If you don't arrive at an article page when you click Go, and you don't find what you're looking for in the search results toward the bottom of the page, your next best move is to switch to another search engine. To do so, type ''site:en.wikipedia.org'' into the search engine's search box, along with whatever word or phrase you were looking for. (The "en" prefix restricts results to the English Wikipedia, otherwise you could get results from a version in the other 250 or so languages.) This technique works for the big three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN searches. If you use another search engine, look at the "advanced search" option (often available only after you do a search) for how to specify that the results should come only from one ___domain.