RP:Searching

Searching ResearchPipeline's wiki This article provides a detailed overview of ResearchPipeline's search feature (in the upper left corner of a ResearchPipeline wiki window.) (There is also a special Search box, which is customizable to search in one or more desired namespaces.) It also includes instructions on using external search engines, such as Google, to find information. For a short introduction to searching ResearchPipeline's wiki, see Look it up. Contents: 1 ResearchPipeline search 2 External search engines 3 Browser-specific help 5 Using ResearchPipeline search to find category intersections 6 If you cannot find an appropriate page on ResearchPipeline's wiki 7 See also ResearchPipeline's wiki search Type your keywords in the box to the left under "search" and then click: File:Go button.JPG - (or Enter on keyboard) takes you to the article. File:Search button.JPG - returns a list of articles and additional search options. Tips for effective searches For now, a summary of the new features (from the mailing list post linked above) are: (1) Did you mean? - depending on the results of a search, some context-sensitive search suggestions are also provided, including suggestions for different spellings. (2) Fuzzy and wildcard queries - a word can be made fuzzy by adding ~ to it's end, e.g. query sarah~ thompson~ will give all different spellings and similar names to sarah thompson. Wildcards can now be prefix and suffix, e.g. *stan will give various countries in Central Asia. (3) prefix: - using this colon-defined search parameter, queries can be limited to pages beginning with certain prefix. E.g. mwsuggest prefix:ResearchPipeline:Village Pump will search all village pumps and archives for mwsuggest. This should be especially useful for archive searching in concert with inputbox or searchbox (4) intitle: - using this colon-defined search parameter, queries can be limited to titles only, for example intitle:blp prefix:ResearchPipeline: (note the need for the trailing colon) find all ResearchPipeline's wiki namespace pages with "blp" in the title. (5) Improved quality - general improved quality of search results via usage of related articles (based on co-occurrence of links), anchor text, text abstracts, proximity within articles, sections, redirects, improved stemming and such. Phrases in double quotes A phrase can be found by enclosing it in double quotes. For example, "holly dolly" returns six matches; holly dolly (two standalone words) returns 197. Go is case sensitive The "go" function uses an algorithm to decide what page you're likely to be interested in, and this usually masks its case sensitivity – but not always. Avoid short and common words If your search terms include a common stop word (such as the, your, more, right, while, when, who, which, such, every, about), you may see many irrelevant results. Wildcards and Boolean searching ResearchPipeline's search feature uses Boolean fulltext search. Please exercise self-restraint when using wildcard characters, as they take a toll on the server. See Boolean fulltext search for details on their use. 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 (computing) that should be fixed – the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent. 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. An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore the name Mu'ammar can be found only by searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with 's is an exception in that it can be found also by searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s. Namespaces The search only applies to the namespaces selected in the user's preferences. To search in a particular namespace, insert its prefix with a colon, for example template:checkmark will search for "checkmark" in template namespace. Use all: prefix to search in all namespaces. To search in any subset of namespaces, use the advanced search form, which appears at the bottom of a search results page, if a search is unsuccessful. Depending on the web browser in use, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but without being effective any longer! To make sure, uncheck and then recheck it. Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image description pages. Delay in updating the search index For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes are not always immediately taken into account in searches. Display of search results Logged in users can choose how much context and how many hits per page to display with a parameter in "My Preferences". External search engines Various search engines can provide domain-specific searches, which let you search ResearchPipeline 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 ResearchPipeline using bookmarklets. In general, external search engines are faster than a ResearchPipeline 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 ResearchPipeline itself. Also, when returning ResearchPipeline articles in a regular search, mirrors and forks of ResearchPipeline content frequently rank higher than the actual ResearchPipeline articles because of search engine optimization techniques. These issues may be less of a problem when using certain search engines that process ResearchPipeline differently: Google tends to include ResearchPipeline as part of its normal search, and it comes up fairly accurately. Yahoo! includes ResearchPipeline as part of its content acquisition program and gets a regular datafeed. Wikimedia-Search Wikimedia-Search with suggest-function and for all projects. Google By following the links below, you can use the Google search engine to search ResearchPipeline – either all languages, or English-only. Google indexes all namespaces except article talk. Search all languages 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 ResearchPipeline. The official Google Toolbar is available in versions for Firefox (Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows), and Internet Explorer (Microsoft Windows). Install Google Toolbar