Help talk:Searching/Archive 1

message: * Is it possible to do a boolean "Turing AND homosexuality" search
:Not easily. This works however: "(?s)(Turing.*homosexuality)|(homosexuality.*Turing)". The search will take forever.
* Can this article be split into "basic" and "advanced" searching advice, since bringing up regular expressions so early on might be a culture shock for non-Unix weenies :)
* Though the new search is faster, but the quality of the search result is extremely low compare to the old slow search.  For example, I just (Oct 18, 2001) searched "Jim Henson" and there were pages and pages and pages of hit, but none of what I searched for show near the top 30.  On the other hand, the slow search produce the results correctly.  Have anyone tested or fine tuned this new search engine on wikipedia?  It is quite unusable as is.
**See Wikipedia commentary/Search Engine. The new search indexes the articles periodically, so new pages don't show up for a bit. The old search simply uncompresses the entire database and greps it, so it will find changes as soon as they happen... if it ever finishes searching. Neither system is perfect, so hopefully there will be improvements. --Stephen Gilbert 19:05, 18 October 2001 (UTC)
thread_title: Some questions

message: 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)
thread_title: Multilinugal Searching

message: 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)
thread_title: Mozilla

message: 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)
thread_title:  Typo 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: Will it ever be updated? -Smack 06:32, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

text: To reiterate: "temporarily". --Brion 06:38, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah, yes.  I missed that.  But then what? -Smack 06:47, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
replies: text: See section "limiting results" in Wikipedia:Searching. --Brion 10:16, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  The search is up, Watson?

message: 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:
*http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usa
*http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
:Hope this helps, Fantasy 08:30, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can't search abbreviations 

message: 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)
replies: text: It'd be useful. But until they link Google, try adding  to your Google search. --Menchi 19:53, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)

text: Google search form is back. --Brion 20:18, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Search is disabled?

message: 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)
replies: text: "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 . CGS 14:14, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Server overloads? 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: Yes, it is possible. Just create a wikipedia:redirect. Martin 23:16, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:   Where do searches go? 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Search Log

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: Where is the google search??? It was so much better... Sam [Spade] 21:46, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Grr, I hate this search thing. Bring back google. See what happens when I typed Hilary Clinton instead of Hillary . This isn't fair on those who can't spell well    :-(( 62.49.5.21 23:17, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Like me! :D Sam [Spade] 23:19, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: Bring back the Google box.  It made researching copyvios so much easier. - Tεxτurε 19:49, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Here is your Google box: Now stop whining :) Adam Bishop 00:33, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

text: 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)

text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  Google search 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  Wikipedia Lookups from IE Address Bar 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  ...and from Mozilla 

message: 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)
thread_title:  [[Wikipedia:Tools]] 

message: 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)
thread_title: Recommendation

message: 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)
thread_title:  [[Cdnow|CDNOW]] 

message: 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)
thread_title: Font size in firefox

message: 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)
replies: text: Good idea. -- Ec5618 17:43, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Redirects

message: 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)
thread_title:  Simple search 

message: 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)
thread_title:  ignore diacritics 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: poor searches

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Articles I've created can not be found via search engine !?! 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Articles for deletion? 

message: 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)
thread_title: Search box on this page?

message: 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)
thread_title:  Is the term "bookmarklets" used correctly? 

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

message: 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)
thread_title: Search result page option?

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Intergrate Google as the wiki search 

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

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
replies: text: There's a request for this feature in mediaZilla — see item #3174. (I've experimented with adding  to search strings, but it doesn't seem to help.) Oh, well. CWC(talk) 00:52, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not seeing any "List redirects" tickbox 

message: Back in October, I wrote new entries for Carl Spaatz and Lyman Lemnitzer. Today I decided to do a search and see if there were any mentions of their names that were not linked back to the main entries. I did, in fact, find two such mentions. But I also found that a google search under "Spaatz" or "Lemnitzer" failed to provide a hit on either of the main entries for these men. Obviously both names were mentioned several times in the relevant entry. Other entries with links to these entries were listed (such as List of people associated with World War II). Google even had the links from my user page which post-dated the creation of these entries. So why doesn't google pick up on them? MK 15:34 (EST) 30 November 2003
:One month isn't that long for Google to find something, particularly if the pages that link to it have a low page rank. Angela 23:37, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Google search not finding main entries 

message: It seems to me it's been a while since Google updated its Wikipedia index. Is that our fault (i.e., did we accidentally tell its robots to go away in one of our files), or is it their fault, or is it my psychotic delusion? -- Someone else 11:22, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Google Indexing Update 

message: Maybe this is obvious and has been discussed before, but have we considered using an appropriate Google Search Appliance .  This is actual hardware that would need to be purchased that would sit in the racks of our servers and could be setup to index the entire Wikipedia every day.  I don't know how expensive this solution is or whether "we" can afford it, but it looks like an ideal solution to the problem.  Any comments? -- FrankH 17:24, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Google Appliance? 

message: Has anyone explored the Atomz Search application?  (see also their FAQ).  I use the free Express version for my personal site, and it works very well, is extraordinarily customizable, easy to integrate into a site, and you control when content is indexed.  I've seen it on many other pro sites as well.  It's a pay service for sites with more than 500 pages (heh), and of course there's no pricing on their website -- it's ye olde "contact our sales staff" routine.  It may be too pricey for a site as large and index-intensive as this one, but it should at least be worth exploring..... especially since the search application in hosted on their servers, not ours.  And who knows, they may be willing to negotiate a deal with a site as prominent as ours is becoming.  Perhaps Jimbo or someone else with an idea of how much we would be willing to spend to have a reliable internal search mechanism could contact them...?
--Catherine - talk 19:31, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Atomz Search?

message: Google Define (that is, typing "define:{term}" at a Google prompt brings up "definitions" (as Google sees it) for {term}. It frequently uses WP for these (if there is a WP entry for {term}, I've never *not* (forgive the double-negative) see Google Define pull it up.  The problem is when one wants to click-through to the entry on WP.  If it is a multi-word entry, the link is invariably malformed.  Instead of using underscores ("_") for spaces in the WP link, Google uses plus signs ("+"), by which WP will fail to find the entry.
How to correct this?
1) Contact Google about this & get them to fix it.
2) Work around it when WP sees that an entry containing "+" is 404 & the link referrer is Google.
Attempts at correction:
1) I have been contacting Google for about 6 (six!) months (as of this entry), & they have not contacted me back. I have sent them about a dozen requests, but the links are still wrong.
2) This entry is my first step toward the second solution.  I have no idea where else to begin, & I am hoping for feedback to point me in the right direction.
TSamuel (talk) 20:44, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Have you tried clicking them? The links seem to work fine for me - just because you see a + doesn't mean it's not getting translated to a space at some point - it works for me --Random832 (contribs) 16:02, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Improper Google Define linking to Wikipedia 

message: http://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org&ns0=1&q=test&fulltext=Advanced+search lists
http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/v:de:Kurs:Software-Test uh? --78.34.4.125 (talk) 14:52, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  badware?