OrthodoxWiki:Searching

There are a number of ways to search OrthodoxWiki.

Built-in Searching

The first thing to note is that when you type a word or phrase into the search box in the right hand column and press "Enter", the software tries to find a page title that matches what you've entered. If that's unsuccessful, it searches the text of the pages. You can also click on "Go" or "Search" to specify what you want the software to do. If Go fails to find an article, it then automatically executes Search which is a full-text search for the given words.

Tips for Searching

• OrthodoxWiki's default search mode will turn up results with any of the words in your query.
• To limit to results that include all words, put a "+" at the beginning of each word.
• You can do a phrase search by enclosing words in quotes.
• To exclude results that include some word, put a "-" at the beginning.
• Avoid short and common words since these often hinder rather than help.
• Search is always case-insensitive, but Go is always case-insensitive for the first character of the article title, and in most cases for the entire title. Go is case-sensitive only if an article has a name including a mixture of capitalized and uncapitalized letters and is neither all initial cap or all lower case following the first word.
• You can use some limited wildcards Look up "fulltext search" on http://www.mysql.com/ and look down under 'boolean search' for the details. However, wildcard searches are slower.
• If a word appears in an article with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in articles, for which this problem does not arise. See the manual of style for more info.
• An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.

Namespace restrictions

On the search page, you can optionally specify namespaces for the search. This is helpful if too many results are returned.

By deault, the search only applies to the namespaces selected in the user's preferences. To search the other namespaces check or uncheck the tickboxes in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page. Depending on the browser, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but without being effective any longer! To make sure, uncheck and recheck it.

• Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image description pages.
• Check or uncheck the tickbox "List redirects" in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.
• The source text (what one sees in the edit box, also called wiki text) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for Wikipedia: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.

For a more exhaustive list of techniques, please see [1] and [2].

Browser Integration

For an overview of browser integration and some useful bookmarklets, please see [3].

Searching with Firefox

In process...

External Search Engines

Google

You can search OrthodoxWiki by entering "site:orthodoxwiki.org example" into a Google searchbox (any other site works too on a similar pattern -- check it out!).

Yahoo

You can search OrthodoxWiki using Yahoo by entering your query on this page.