Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 23:55, 23 February 2006

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Misplaced Pages contains articles on a great number of subjects. However, finding the right article is not always easy. This article details ways in which to find articles that are relevant to you. There are several ways in which articles can be found:

• the searchbox
• external search engines
• browsing categories

Search engines

Search facility of Misplaced Pages

See also Misplaced Pages:Look it up, for a general guide.

The native Misplaced Pages search feature via the search box and Search button that appears on every Misplaced Pages page is not available during peak hours or other periods of high server activity (which may last for days). Here are some hints for using it effectively (see also Misplaced Pages:User preferences help, "Search result settings" section, and Misplaced Pages:Go button).

Limiting results

Misplaced Pages's default search mode will turn up results with any of the words in your query. For instance, search engine turns up many results containing only "search" but not "engine" or only "engine" but not "search" in addition to the ones you probably wanted, which contain both words.

To limit to results that include all words, put a "+" at the beginning of each word: +search +engine returns only pages containing both words, like Google's default mode.

You can also do a phrase search by enclosing words in quotes: "search engine" turns up a smaller set of results, which not only have both words but have them in order.

To exclude results that include some word, put a "-" at the beginning: search -engine

Avoid short and common words

If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about") it will be ignored by the search system. If you're trying to do a phrase search or all-words-only search, this may result in returning nothing at all. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all articles, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.

See Misplaced Pages:Common words, searching for which is not possible for the stop words filtered out by the database. From there one can at least go to an article with a stop word as title. Searching for the combination of one or more words and the common word "not" gives a database query syntax error due to a bug in the software.

Case sensitivity

Search is always case-insensitive, so searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.

Go is always case-insensitive for the first character of the article title, and in most cases for the entire title. It tries to make a good guess of which article you are looking for. See Meta:Help:Go button for a description of how this works.

Wildcards

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.

Words with special characters

In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed -- the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent. See also Misplaced Pages:Special characters.

Words in single quotes

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.

Namespaces searched by default

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.

Redirects can be excluded

Check or uncheck the tickbox "List redirects" in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.

The source text is searched

The source text (what one sees in the edit box, also called wiki text) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for Misplaced Pages: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.

Delay in updating the search index

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

At the moment, the search engine uses an index that isn't updated at all. This is temporary (temporary since 2003-08-06, the date this line was added).

Multi-lingual Misplaced Pages search

There is a meta-search available that allows you to search different language Wikipedias at the same time.

Multi-lingual Misplaced Pages search (disabled)

You can also do this using google or Lumrix: AJAX driven Misplaced Pages search engine.

External search engines

Various search engines can provide domain-specific searches, which lets you search Misplaced Pages specifically. Searches are based on the text as shown by the browser, so wiki markup is irrelevant. Depending on your browser, you may also be able to use tools that allow you to search Misplaced Pages using bookmarklets.

In general, external search engines are faster than a Misplaced Pages search. However, because the search engine's cache is based on when the site was indexed, the search may not return newly created pages. Similarly, the search engine's cached version of the page will not be as up-to-date as the link to Misplaced Pages itself. Also, when returning Misplaced Pages articles in a regular search, mirrors and forks of Misplaced Pages content frequently rank higher than the actual Misplaced Pages articles because of search engine optimization techniques.

These issues may be less of a problem when using certain search engines that process Misplaced Pages differently:

• Yahoo! includes Misplaced Pages as part of its content acquisition program and gets a regular datafeed.
• Clusty downloads and processes the database regularly, generating automatic abstracts and image thumbnails and meaningfully parsing redirects, disambiguations, and categories.

Google

By following the links below, you can use the Google search engine to search Misplaced Pages - either all languages, or English-only. Google indexes all namespaces.

• Search all languages
• Search the English Misplaced Pages only
• Search the English Misplaced Pages (excluding articles nominated for deletion)

If you frequently search via Google, consider installing the Google Toolbar. Using the "search this site" button allows you to quickly search the English version of Misplaced Pages. The official Google Toolbar is for Internet Explorer (Windows only) and for Firefox (works on all operating system platforms for which Firefox is available, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X).

Yahoo!

By following the links below, you can use the Yahoo! search engine to search Misplaced Pages - either all languages or English-only.

• Search all Wikipedias with Yahoo!
• Search English Wikipedias 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 the English version of Misplaced Pages. The official Yahoo! Companion Toolbar is only for Windows with Internet Explorer and Mozilla.

Qwika

Qwika is designed specifically to index wikis. Its main index is Misplaced Pages. It includes:

• all namespaces of Misplaced Pages
• English machine-translated into German, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portugese, Spanish, Greek, Korean, Chinese and Russian.
• The above languages machine translated into English.

This can assist editors contributing to non-English Wikipedias by being able to search in their own language across the entire English version and then view the machine-translated version in their language.

• Qwika main page and explanation

Clusty

By following the link below, you can use the Clusty search engine to search and cluster Misplaced Pages in English only.

• Search and Cluster English Misplaced Pages with Clusty

If you frequently search via Clusty, consider installing the Clusty Toolbar (beta). Selecting the "Encyclopedia" search source allows you to quickly search the English version of Misplaced Pages. The Clusty Toolbar is available for Windows with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (beta).

LuMriX

LuMriX is a dynamic query tool which uses lookahead to predict search terms in a list, similar to Google Suggest.

By following the link below, you can use the LuMriX search engine to search different language versions of Misplaced Pages.

• Search Wikipedias with LuMriX

If you frequently search via LuMriX, consider installing the LuMriX Firefox Search Plugin (works on all operating system platforms for which Firefox is available, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X).

Wikiwax

Wikiwax is a dynamic query like LuMriX. It only searches english Misplaced Pages, but shows more list entries.

• WikiWax Index to Misplaced Pages

Other

Here are more Misplaced Pages:Tools which make searching more convenient.

Browser specific help

Using Mozilla to automatically search

Listed below are ways to search Misplaced Pages with Mozilla-based browsers, including Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox, and Netscape 6 and 7.

Search Misplaced Pages from the sidebar search tab or address bar

Works with: Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape 6/7.

Mozilla and Netscape 6 & 7 come with a sidebar that allows a user to search the Misplaced Pages site, and Firefox has a toolbar item to do the same. To install the search plugin that tells Mozilla how to search Misplaced Pages, do the following:

1. Go to one of the following sources of Misplaced Pages search plugins. The Mycroft plugins are sometimes out of date, and plugins from the second source may work better.
   1. Original search plugins from Mycroft
   2. Updated search plugins
2. There are versions for many languages, so pick the language local to your area.
3. If JavaScript is enabled, clicking on the name of the search plugin will automatically install the search plugin.
4. If you can't install the search plugin automatically, the second source above lets you right-click on the plugin and save it to disk, or download a ZIP file containing all available plugins. Save the downloaded .src file in the searchplugins directory where Mozilla is installed and restart the browser to use the new plugin.

To make Misplaced Pages your default search engine in Mozilla, Beonex Communicator, and Netscape 6/7:

1. Go to Edit, Preferences.
2. Expand the Navigator tree and choose Internet Search.
3. Choose Misplaced Pages as your default search engine.

With Misplaced Pages selected as your default engine, searches can be conducted via the search sidebar tab, search box, or the web address bar.

Search Misplaced Pages using a bookmarklet

Works with: Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape 6/7.

Misplaced Pages can also be searched via a bookmarklet.

In Mozilla Firefox, follow these steps:

1. Right click in the search field at the top of the page, and select "Add a Keyword for this Search".
2. Enter "Misplaced Pages Quicksearch" for the name.
3. Enter "w" (without the quotes) for the keyword.
4. Change the bookmark folder if you wish, and click "Add".

In Mozilla Suite, Netscape 6/7 and Beonex Communicator, follow these steps:

1. Right click on the following web address and select "Bookmark this link": http://en.wikipedia.org/Special:Search?search=%s
2. Go to Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks. Choose the bookmark you have just created. Highlight the Bookmark and click Properties.
3. In the dialogue that comes up, put a lowercase w in the keyword box.
4. Click OK and close the properties box, then close the bookmark manager.

In Camino, use the Mozilla Suite directions. Use Get Info (cmd-I) in the bookmarks manager to bring up the properties dialogue.

To search, go to the web address bar, enter "w SEARCH_QUERY" (without the quotes), and press enter.

javascript:x=escape(getSelection());if(!x)%7Bvoid(x=prompt('Enter%20Word:',''))%7D;if(x)window.location='http://en.wikipedia.org/Special:Search?search='+x

user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/Special:Search?search=");

user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/Special:Search?search=");

Name=&Misplaced Pages
URL=http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=%s
Query=
Key=w
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=utf-8
Search Type=8

• Misplaced Pages features