Help:Searching
| ||||||||
How to
At the top of the page is the navbar, within this contains a 'Search' box. Enter key words and phrases and press Enter or Return to begin. If a page has the same title as what you entered and press Enter or Return, you jump straight to the that page. Otherwise, it searches all pages on the wiki (with some restrictions, see below), and presents a list of pages that matched your search tearms, or a message informing you that no page has all the key words or phrases.
Tips
- 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 engines
Various search engines can provide domain-specific searches, which lets you search DCCWiki specifically. Searches are based on the text as shown by the browser, so wiki markup is irrelevant.
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 DCCWiki itself.
By following the links below, you can use the Google search engine to search DCCWiki - either all languages, or English-only. Google indexes all namespaces.
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 DCCWiki. 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 DCCWiki - either all languages or English-only.
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 DCCWiki. The official Yahoo! Companion Toolbar is only for Windows with Internet Explorer and Mozilla.
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.
Wildcards
You can use some limited wildcards if you really want to. For example, 'com*and' will find all instances of 'commands'.
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.
Delay in updating the search index
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes are not always immediately taken into account in searches. Typically, results appear in the search results in under a minute but can take up to 15 minutes to display.
Searching the page history
To search the text that appears only in the page history, you must export the text to XML format first.
If you cannot find an appropriate page on DCCWiki
If there is no appropriate page on DCCWiki, consider creating a page, since you can edit DCCWiki content.