From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia has an extremely powerful search engine built in, which can be used to locate material on Wikipedia more easily and more precisely than well known external web search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.
The search box is located at the top right on every page on the standard Wikipedia skin (Vector). It will take you to the article that matches your query; otherwise it displays the search results. To display the full search results, click on the last item in drop-down list (which says «⧼vector-simplesearch-containing⧽»), or perform an empty search. The direct link for the advanced interface is Special:Search.
You can also search directly from your Web Browser.
Parts of this උදවු page (those related to section) need to be updated. වත්මන් සිදුවීම් වලින් සහ නවතම තොරතුරු වලින් මෙම උදවු page යාවත් කාලීන කිරීමට කාරුණික වන්න. වැඩිමනත් තොරතුරු සඳහා සාකච්ඡා පිටුව බලන්න. |
The default search only applies to the Mainspace, where articles are stored. When searching for articles, a box on the right of the search results page shows the most relevant results from our sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikisource and Wikibooks. Other types of content pages can be searched by selecting an option from the grey search types box below the search input box.
If Multimedia is selected, you can search images, videos and songs stored on Wikipedia or විකිමාධ්ය කොමන්ස්. This option will search their file names and descriptions.
If Help and Project pages is selected, you can search the "Help" and "Wikipedia" namespaces. These namespaces contain help pages, Wikipedia guidelines and policies, and all pages used for administration and maintenance of the site. If you have a specific question about Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Questions for where to find answers.
If Everything is selected, you can search all namespaces.
To search in any subset of namespaces, click Advanced on the search form. A quicker way to search a single namespace is to type the namespace, a colon, then the search term in the search box, for example Wikipedia:Verifiability returns search results for verifiability in the Wikipedia namespace.
Registered users can modify the default namespace to search in "My Preferences". They can also choose how much context and how many hits per page to display when viewing search results. See Help:Preferences for more information.
[1]==Navigat
පෙළ</nowiki>/gallery> </gallery> ion pages== Navigation pages will attempt to guide you to the correct article. You may encounter two types of these pages when searching for a topic.
The internal search engine can search for parts of page titles or page title prefixes, and in specific categories and namespaces. It can also limit a search to pages with specific words in the title or located in specific categories or namespaces. It can handle parameters an order of magnitude more sophisticated than most external search engines, including user-specified words with variable endings and similar spellings. When presenting results, the internal search understands and will link to relevant sections of a page (although to a limited degree some other search engines may do this as well).
The internal search is also able to search all pages for project purposes, whereas external search engines cannot be used on any talk page, a large part of projectspace, and any page tagged as noindex.
The source text (what one sees in the edit box) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for 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. To find a word or phrase that is the same as an article title, prefix a "-"; otherwise you will go directly to the article of that title, when what you want are the list of articles with that word or phrase. e.g. "-timeline".
Upper and lower case as well as some umlauts and accents are disregarded in search. For example, a search for citroen will find pages containing the word Citroën (c = C, e = ë). Some ligatures match the separate letters. For example, a search for aeroskobing will find pages containing Ærøskøbing (ae = Æ).
The following features can be used to refine searches:
Query | Result |
---|---|
intitle:airport | All articles with airport in their title. |
intitle:international airport | Articles containing international and airport in their title (including World's busiest airports by international passenger traffic). |
parking intitle:airport | Articles with "airport" in their title and "parking" in their text |
intitle:"international airport" | Articles containing the exact expression "international airport" in their title. |
incategory: - using the incategory: parameter returns pages in a given category (as long as the pages are directly categorized, and not transcluded through templates). This feature doesn't return pages in subcategories. Note that, for category names that contain a space, either the space must be replaced with an underscore or the category name must be surrounded by double quotes for the search to be effective.
For more on using categories to find articles, see Wikipedia:FAQ/Categories. Example searches using incategory:
Query | Result |
---|---|
ammonia incategory:German_chemists | Articles containing the text "ammonia" among pages in Category:German chemists. |
incategory:"Suspension bridges in the United States" incategory:"Bridges in New York City" | Articles that are common to both categories — the suspension bridges in New York City. |
Query | Result |
---|---|
Salvage wreck prefix:USS | Articles containing the words salvage and wreck whose title starts with the characters "USS". |
prefix:Help:Contents/ | Subpages of Help:Contents. Note that subpages are never used on the main encyclopedia. |
"portal namespace" readers prefix:Wikipedia talk: | Discussions of any page in the Wikipedia namespace page having the word readers and the phrase portal namespace. |
ocean heat reservoir prefix:Talk:Earth/Archive | Any archived discussion with the words heat and ocean and reservoir. |
language prefix:Portal:Chi | Portal namespace page names that begin with "Portal:Chi" and have the word language in the page. |
When using the search to directly get to a page, it doesn't matter whether you enter capitals or lower case letters (unless there are two article titles which differ only in capitalization). Umlauts and accents are also disregarded, but ligatures do not match the separate letters.
Specialized uses of the search to directly get to a page include the following:
Special:LinkSearch is a tool for searching for external links from Wikipedia pages to sites outside Wikipedia. For example, all Wikipedia pages linking to Yahoo.com.
External search engines – see Wikipedia:External search engines and Wikipedia:Tools#Searching
Other languages – for searching other language editions of Wikipedia see http://wikipedia.org/ and the links above.
Toolserver - there are multiple tools on Toolserver, most notably:
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.