Help talk:Searching

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Please either comment out or remove the Help:Searching#All section -> prefixing searches with All: currently does not work as described. – 2804:F1...93:9B16 (talk) 00:25, 18 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

 Done, along with a bunch of other cleanup.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:30, 19 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

The wikisource of this page has a bunch of <section> markup, all of which appears to be broken. In order of appearance, it is in this form:

<section end="Search results page" /><section begin="Refining results" />
...
<section end="User preferences" /><section begin="Redirects" />
...
<section end="Other uses" /><section begin="User preferences" />

This all appears to be invalid, either because it is in backwards order or because it a start tag without an end tag or vice versa. I'm not sure what the intent was and what other pages might be trying to selectively transclude portions of this page, so I have not removed this broken code or attempted to repair it. Someone(s) else who better know(s) what the intended results were will need to address this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:38, 19 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

I understand that this is the page to help readers understand how to use the search bar. What would be the page to suggest a change in how the search bar results work? I want to make a suggestion but I don't know the correct place to do that. Ladtrack (talk) 18:54, 19 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Ladtrack. WP:VPT since there may already be a way to do what you want. If not, they are qualified to say whether it could be done. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:50, 25 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

What became of the search bar that had been near the top of the page of every Wikipedia article? Lately I haven't see any such search bar. After a lot of hunting and pecking, the only substitute that I have found so far involves going to the help desk and clicking on the link for search box. Why make searching for anything so unnecessarily difficult?98.149.97.245 (talk) 14:23, 20 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

It is still there for me at the top of the page on a Win 10 Pro PC in Firefox in the default Vector skin whether I am logged in or not. What are you using? --Timeshifter (talk) 19:11, 20 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

I found no such search bar anymore on an HP Pavilion laptop for Google Chrome or Firefox. I know nothing about Vector skin.98.149.97.245 (talk) 19:46, 20 December 2024 (UTC) It turns out that clearing cache and cookies did not fix the problem after all.98.149.97.245 (talk) 19:49, 20 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

OK. I see the search bar when I click the magnifying glass at the top of the page. On both Firefox and Chrome. So technically, you don't see the search bar at the top of the page at first. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:06, 21 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

The search box only appears with the default Vector skin if the window is wide enough.

I don't think it is accurate to say "a search box on every page" because if the window is too narrow, only the magnifying glass appears, and it has to be clicked on to get the search box RichardN (talk) 11:09, 16 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Can't find how to make Case sensitive searches (advanced) nor punctuation (e.g. searching '!'). gtp (talk) 12:53, 30 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

It's not a Search for help. It's a way to make you notice that and discuss. gtp (talk) 12:55, 30 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

The regex search Special:Search/intitle:/Acetoxyacetyl/ returns Acetoxyacetylaminofluorene. However, non-regex versions of this search incorrectly return no results:

• Special:Search/intitle:Acetoxyacetyl returns no results, instead suggesting Special:Search/intitle:acetoacetyl
• Special:Search/intitle:"acetoxyacetyl" and Special:Search/intitle:"Acetoxyacetyl" return no results, instead suggesting wikt:acetoxyacetyl
• Special:Search/intitle:acetoxyacetyl also returns no results, but is non-deterministic, switching replacement suggestions between Special:Search/intitle:acetoacetyl and wikt:acetoxyacetyl seemingly at random.

Would someone else be able to check whether they get the same behavior? If so, I'll try and report the bug on Phabricator as it seems like a failure of basic search functionality. Acetoxyacetylaminofluorene was created in 2009 and last edited in 2022, so it's not like there have been any recent changes to throw off search indexing. Preimage (talk) 10:05, 31 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

Preimage That behavior seems correct to me. Non-regex search, iirc, is a word-search function, not a partial-search one. Note that this search for intitle:Antikyth fails to find Antikythera device, and that is as expected. Mathglot (talk) 10:26, 31 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

Oh yep, that makes sense. Thanks @Mathglot! Preimage (talk) 10:28, 31 December 2024 (UTC)Reply

If the title of a page is <name of topic> (field or category or whatever) e.g. Word (computer architecture) then it should be given much higher relevance if the left half of the title matches exactly the specified title (ignoring case), the inverse should also be true, the relevance boost for a searched word appearing in the title of the page should be less if that word is in parenthesis. Example: "Word (computer architecture)" in a title search for "Word" is probably of higher relevance to the search than Nosferatu (word) but is not listed as such. Apersoma (talk) 16:47, 13 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Is there a tag or setting that can be added to a meta page so it doesn't show up in a search? When I searched for "WP:MfD" I saw this old joke page in the search results, and I thought this is less useful and more distracting: Wikipedia:MfD/WP:MfD/WP:MfD/Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Xaosflux/Requests for adminship/Wikipe-tan (2nd nom). If not, an option is to nominate it for deletion. Jay 💬 09:14, 3 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

How can I search by giving a word in the title of redirect pages? I do not want article titles in the results, only redirects. Jay 💬 11:24, 20 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

I want a search for PQR outside templates. to find

• ABC {{JKL}}a PQR b{{UVW}}XYZ}}
• ABC {{m PQRF n}}c PQRdef{{UVW}}XYZ}}

but not

• ABC {{PQR M}}HHH {{UVW}}XYZ}}

Naraht (talk) 15:47, 29 August 2025 (UTC)Reply

Do you mean you don't want PQR in the template names? Those are fairly easy to exclude from searches. But if you also mean excluding cases where PQR appears in template parameters, that's much harder, since some templates, like Cite web, can be extremely long, e.g., {{Cite web |title=Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, ... PQR.

• insource:/PQR/ -insource:/\{\{[^{}]+PQR/ should find your first example (i.e., "PQR" appearing somewhere but not inside a template at all), but not the second or third examples.
• insource:/PQR/ insource:/\{\{[^{}]+PQR/ insource:/[^{]{50}PQR/ should find the second example (i.e., "PQR" appearing both inside a template and somewhere outside a template), but not the first or third examples. This query has limitations, and you might want to adjust the "50" in [^{]{50}, which matches any character other than the template-starting character {, repeated 50 times.

If you don't want to catch, e.g., "SPQR" or "1PQR", but only matches starting with "PQR", then replace PQR with [^a-zA-Z0-9]PQR or with something similar in those search strings.
Also, those queries work okay-ish, since there are "only" 1,799 articles containing "PQR": insource:/PQR/. So, if your actual search string is much more common, for example, appearing in hundreds of thousands of articles, there's a high chance the search will time out before you get the full results. --JAAqqO (talk) 20:07, 29 August 2025 (UTC)Reply

JAAqqO Sorry, my fault I should have made it more clear that PQR was an example. And I'm being greedy here, What I really want is to find instances of the string "Fraternity, Inc" but to ignore any that occur inside of templates as such as a cite book containing "publisher=Omega Alpha Omega Fraternity, Incorporated". Not sure that I'm going to have much luck on something that won't time out pretty quickly. I'm not sure that simply adding fraternity to the search (to lower the number of articles the regex starts from will help much from having a timeout.Naraht (talk) 01:27, 30 August 2025 (UTC)Reply