Help:Searching

Shortcut: P:SEARCH

To search Pikipedia:

• There should be a small search box at the top of the screen, marked Search Pikipedia; just type what you're looking for into the search box and click the magnifying glass. This will take you straight to the article if one with the exact name exists, and search all articles otherwise.
• Or, go to the search page to search the criteria in all articles. To get there quickly, just click the magnifying glass without typing anything into the search box.

The most important search tip is: don't search for only words in quotes. Try the search without quotes first. If that's not good enough, put as many words as possible outside the quotes or add some more to narrow the search.

External search

It is possible to search Pikipedia with external search engines.

Google:

• Search Pikipedia with Google

If you frequently search via Google, consider installing the Google Toolbar. Using the "search this site" button allows you to quickly search a site.

Yahoo:

• Search Pikipedia with Yahoo!

If you frequently search via Yahoo!, consider installing the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Using the "Search Only the Current Site" button allows you to quickly search a site.

Important details

Searches can be limited using the following:

• Normal searches will search for articles with any one of the words searched for.
• Type "+" before each word to search for articles that contain all search terms.
• To search for a specific phrase with the words in the order entered, enclose the words in quotes (").
• To search for articles without a particlar word, append "-" to the start of that word in the search.

Common words such as "the", "one", "your", "who", "which", "such", "about" and "Pikmin" are ignored, as are short numbers.

For the first word of the search, capitalization makes no difference to the results; for all proceeding words in the search, however, results are produced on a case-sensitive basis.

You can use some limited wildcards if you really want to. Look up "fulltext search" on http://www.mysql.com and look down under 'boolean search' for the details. However, wildcard searches are slower, so go easy on the poor server.

If a word appears in an article with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes.

The search only applies to the namespaces selected on the search results page. To search in other namespaces, select or unselect the items in the "Add namespaces..." box found on the page. Registered users can check the "Remember selection for future searches" box to save these settings for every time they search.

The displayed text (what one sees rendered on the page) is searched, not the wikitext. This distinction is relevant when attempting to search for specific formatting or syntax. To search the wikitext source instead, use the format insource:"Text goes here".

For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes are not always immediately taken into account in searches.

The search feature is not guaranteed to be reliable, and may return unexpected and unintelligent results.