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I tried using the instructions for adding a Wikipedia Quick Shortcut to Opera 8, and it doesn't work at all. If I try typing in "w test" into my address bar, Opera tries to go to wtest.com.
For all people speaking more than one language, it would be a help if the search engine returns hits (no full text search, I think) from other languages, if no article is found. 192.33.101.239 14:23, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The search page's Google search form should be fixed to search en.wikipedia.org instead of www.wikipedia.org since most English pages are now indexed by Google at the new domain.
Why can't I find the word "self"? How is that badly formed?
== ignoring words ==]]]] While length is not a useful way to decide what goes in the index, as above postings have made clear, certainly the most common words should be excluded. But why not just ignore such words rather than force the user to delete them and try again? Google does this, simply informing the user on the results page that "XXX is a very common word and was ignored." -- Michael Shulman
To do this, I've have to include the entire MySQL stoplist in the Wikipedia software itself. I'm not sure that's worth the effort. LDC
I come from the German wikipedia, and that language has, like many others, diacritical letters, which are often expressed by some other means, e.g. use 'ss' instead the sharp s 'ß', or 'ae' instead of 'ä'. The situation is similar in Spanish (e.g., á é í ó ú), ... Names are often written in the spelling of the original language (Perón of Argentina), or simply as Peron.
i think that is one error to change artcyclopedia , because before i was able to find , for example :DAUBIGNY , at all museums of the world, please don´t change painters online, is the better of i never have seen in internet, , http://www.guillermograndal.com ,
Thus it would be great to have 'equivalent characters', which permit a user to say 'o' and 'ó' are to be treated identical in this search.
Have there been any thoughts in this direction? -- Schewek
Searching for Down fails. But not all four-letter searches fail. I know there's an entry labeled Down, why does the search fail? -- Zoe
I've mentioned the arbitrary length to Lee on the mailing list; he agreed that it was a problem (consider these searches: malcolm x, george w bush, pi). Anyway, he promised to look into it. Koyaanis Qatsi 16:54 Jul 22, 2002 (PDT)
You can find "blue", "fire", and "cats" just fine. And the new software produces useful results for "cat", "ct", and "pi". MySQL still won't index single letters, so "Malcolm X" does find "Malcolm X", but only because it finds every Malcolm. "Will" is a problem, because it is in MySQL stoplist, i.e., common words like "the" and "have" that are not indexed. That's the problem with "down" as well (though that makes a little less sense. I'm not sure what MySQL's criteria were for their stoplist). LDC
Oh, so you've fixed that already. I missed the announcement, sorry. Thanks for all your work, BTW. Koyaanis Qatsi
Wrote a page on will. Also wrote a page on poverty, but I'm worried about the fact that Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Mswake 12:31 Jul 26, 2002 (PDT)
Funny to find discussion on will (which, btw, you still can't find by searching) because I can't access my article on free will by searching. What gives?
Is there a way to search for phrases? Bob Jonkman
I don't really know about these things, so I won't do it myself, but should the link at the bottom of this page to Google reference wikipedia.org rather than wikipedia.com now? -- Camembert
Can anyone tell me exactly what to do to get mozilla to search wikipedia by default? --the semi-computer literate KQ
Add the Wikipedia (EN) search plugin, available at Mycroft site, then go to Edit->Preferences->Internet Search and make it your default plugin by selecting it from the dropdown list. :) -- Unforgettableid | talk to me 05:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
In order to make searching work reasonably, we have to be aware of American / British spelling differences. For example, if you search for "electronic colour code", you fail to find the article electronic color code, which was presumably originally written by a USAite. As the text is written, there is no conventient way to slip the word "colour" into the body of the text so that it gets found in a search.
I've tried adding text in html comments <!-- electronic colour code --> which seem to work as comments if on a line by themselves. but not if embedded mid paragraph. Search doesn't find them. Is there a way of adding "keywords" for searching to an article? Is there a way (like misspelling) of automatically making a search for either color or for colour actually search for "(color or colour)"? -- SGBailey 22:26 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
What do we do for "significant" search keywords which are not in the article name? As an *example* if there was an articel 'Famous actors', we might have text "theater" in the article but want "theatre" to also work in searches. -- SGBailey 22:57 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
Another one on searches: Try searching for the four colour theorem: The following are rejected by SQL:
yet the follwoing work:
Why? -- SGBailey 22:37 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
Can the search engine developers confirm this? And for SGBailey, Try Wikipedia:Searching -- User:kt2
Hi!
I'm puzzled by the search box at the bottom of each page. There are two words (to the right of the box) SEARCH and GO. But they seem to do the same thing. I've never seen two words to choose from on any other web site.Please explain!
Arpingstone 10:32 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)
There seems to be something wrong with the search engine. Not a major functional problem - it's finding things all right - just with the way it's displaying the results. It used to be that each item on the search results list would have the article title followed by an extract from the article with the search term/s highlighted; what I'm getting now is the article title followed by 50 characters from each of the first five lines of the article, which isn't often very helpful. Does anybody know what's going on? -- Paul A, 4 Feb 2003 8:30 UTC
It also seems to be displaying things in a different order. In fact, I can't work out the logic of the order it's displaying things at all. For example, I just searched for Lou Harrison, and the first fourteen article text results had "Lou" and "Harrison" in them, but not the whole phrase "Lou Harrison". As a result, a lot of irrelevant stuff is given prominence. Sorry if this has been brought up somewhere else, I've not spotted it. -- Camembert
rm acapedia, because the cached version redirects to the current wikipedia version for some links - MyRedDice
What do you mean? Google caches a 2nd copy of wikipedia articles through acapedia, as far as I have seen, and a better one: it does not have the problem that Google text interferes with the top of the article text. - Patrick 22:30 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)
It seems you have searched the whole web for the term "acapedia", but you have to search acapedia (take my link) for some other term, for example "rijngouwelijn". Then you get http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cof=&domains=acapedia.org&q=rijngouwelijn&btnG=Google+Search&sitesearch=acapedia.org
The second cached result is
which is better than
Congratulations on making the wikipedia totally unusable in all practical respects. If you can't search the database then what's the point in having one? I'm not going to bother writing article when nobody can find them for a month. Goodbye. KJ 01:12 Apr 4, 2003 (UTC)
It would be good if the wikipedia namespace would be included in the titles search when Wikipedia's internal full-text search facility is temporarily disabled.
Even when Wikipedia's internal full-text search facility is on, a title search option would be useful (faster if here are many hits in the full text).
Patrick 12:04 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)
I think this page is overly complicated, and the striked paragraphs make it even more confusing
A simple rewrite would be based on examples, possibly similar to the How to edit a page page.. I will try to simplify it.. -- Rotem Dan 21:22 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump
Is it just me, or is search completely broken at the moment (ie. returning no article title matches for keywords that I know should have matches)? -- rbrwr
Why is it that when I click the "go" button, it almost invariably takes me to the Talk page instead of to the article page? -- Zoe
The list of words not used in searches seems reasonable for words IN articles. Is there anyway that the search of article TITLES could use ALL words? -- 217.24.129.50
I'd like an easy way to search for articles containing the text "worcester" that do not link to Worcester, England, Worcester, Worcestershire, etc, so that I can link them properly (if relevant, of course). Is there any way to do this? Martin 18:45 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)
There is a typo on the search stub page that is in place while searching is disabled: "perfromance". I assume that text isn't accessible to ordinary Wikipedians, but if it is, just let me know how and I'll fix it. -- Jketola 21:05, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Full-text search is back up, with no apparent slowing of the server - what happened? Did a bug just get fixed? - Smack 05:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Can't you make searches non-case sensitive by default? Phys
Searching for abbreviations, such as "MP3" or "USA" doesn't work. Why is this?
Thanks, I'll remember that, though I still think this search engine desperately needs revising.
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, September 25th, 2003.
So when is it coming back? Wikipedia is virtually unusable without some kind of search capability. Even a link to Google would be nice, like the last time. RickK 19:47, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, October 9th, 2003.
Why do I get so many 'server overloads' when I try searching for any article? It would seem to me that the problem may be lack of bandwidth. If that is the problem then why is it not being dealt with?
This is probably a simple data error, but I don't yet know how to fix it myself: When I enter "ct scan" in Wikipedia's mini-search bar I end up on "Ultrasound scan" (a related but different subject). There is a much more relevant page available, computed_axial_tomography. Searching for "CT scan" takes me there. Is it possible for a mere site-visitor to change where a search will take me? -- 195.22.85.154 14:43, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Back before the Wiki Search was taken down, there used to be a Search log, where we could see what things people were searching for. Is that still available? RickK 06:32, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Is the text search of Wikipedia permeanently disabled? Every single time I go to use it, it says:
Or am I doing something wrong? LUDRAMAN | T 17:31, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
As I understand it, search is supposed to be case-insensitive, as referenced in Wikipedia:Searching#Search_is_case-insensitive -- but when I search for "dj leslie", the DJ leslie entry doesn't come up. Am I missing something, or should I make a bug report? -- Twiin 15:22, 05 May, 2004 (UTC)
Full-text search appears to be working again, thanks to the new hardware. Very nice. Perhaps an announcement on Wikipedia:Announcements should be in order? - Plutor 19:27, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I miss the google search box, can we have that back as well as the wikipedia searching? Spare a thought for those who can't spell well Dmn 17:30, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps you misunderstand? I like how I could so quickly find articles w similar words, yet w different spellings, etc.. The old way of searching was just so handy, and the new way... not :*( Sam [ Spade] 00:46, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Exactly, I didn't mean to say it's bad to have the full text thing, I just don't prefer it in exclusion of the old google option. Google is more handy for finding similar spellings of a given search. Sam [ Spade] 04:53, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say! Sam [ Spade] 20:39, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I've discovered a cool way to directly go to Wikipedia articles from the IE address bar in Windows XP. First go here and download TweakUI.exe on the right-hand side:
Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP
Install it and then run it. Open the Internet Explorer node on the left side, then click Search. Click the Create button, and enter these in the fields:
Prefix: wp URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:search?search=%s&go=Go
For the politically-minded of us, you can create a similar shortcut for going to Wikipedia namespace articles, like this:
Prefix: wpw URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:search?search=Wikipedia: %s&go=Go
Then you can type, for example, "wp Wikipedia" in the address bar to visit the article on Wikipedia, or "wpw Village pump", for this page.
Deco 05:12, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
How to do the same thing in Mozilla, Firefox, etc.:
That's it-- you don't need to download anything. Marnanel 16:51, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Today is July 26, 2004 and I wanted to search the Wikipedia: namespace for articles on identity and anonymity. So I typed "anonymity" in the search box (I use the monobook skin) and clicked "Search" (not "Go"). This gave me a "Search results" page with dozens of irrelevant hits, most of which are not in the Wikipedia: namespace. But this was ok. At the bottom of the page was the form that I was looking for. I unchecked the Main namespace and all other namespaces and only checked the Wikipedia: namespace. In this form, there was no "Go" button, only a "Search" button. So I clicked it. And I immediately landed on the Main:Anonymity page, as if I had clicked a "Go" button. It turns out that the first HTML form had two <input type=submit> buttons. One with value=Go name=go and the other with value=Search name=fulltext. But the HTML form at the bottom of the Search results page had only one <input type=submit> button, featuring value=Search name=searchx. I think this "searchx" should be "fulltext" and that there should be a "go" button next to it. -- LA2 26 Jul 2004
Does anyone know why the default search (i.e. punching something into the text field and hitting "Search") searches Template Talk? -- Ben Brockert 21:55, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia_talk:Searching#Google_search seems to have a concensus of "lets bring back the google search". Sam [ Spade] 23:32, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
People are always quick to moan about what they've lost, but not so quick to cheer for what they've got. Is there any way of still using the Wikipedia search? It was always great for searching the wiki coding on each page. I now miss that.
SimonMayer 13:59, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
That is ok then. I was just concerned that we'd lost something important, but if it's on at late night, I'll cope.
SimonMayer 16:24, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I am currently, together with User:Sj, establishing the page Wikipedia:Tools. The goal is to given an overview of tools for browsing and editing the wikipedia. I would suggest to integrate some parts of this page into Wikipedia:Tools and link to that page here. Anyhow, it is important to coordinate the contents of this two pages, to avoid overlap and confusion. -- 217.82.181.205 23:57, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC) 23:34, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC) (that is de:Benutzer:Duesentrieb)
Why is it that the search function seems to be randomly disabled and enabled every day? One moment it works, then later the same day it just offers the Google/Yahoo search. Is this an automatic load-dependent regulation? Gzornenplatz 15:35, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
I removed this section because telling people to run a block of unreadable base64 code is not safe or wise. I don't have Firefox or Opera, so I can't test it, but when I un-base64'd and un-percent-quoted it, it didn't seem to have any problems, but still, since data scheme url's don't need to be in base64 it is better for readability for them not to be. Please find some safer way to write this; it is a good thing to have.
===Search Wikipedia from a sidebar tab=== Works with: Mozilla Firefox, Opera 7. Wikipedia can also be searched via a sidebar tab of its own. To install the tab, copy the text below into the web address bar and press Enter, then click "Add Sidebar": data:text/html;base64,PGEgcmVsPXNpZGViYXIgdGl0bGU9IlNlYXJjaCBXaWtpcGVkaWE iIGhyZWY9ImRhdGE6dGV4dC9odG1sLCUzQ2Jhc2UlMjBocmVmJTNEJTIyaHR0cCUzQSUyRiUy RmVuLndpa2lwZWRpYS5vcmclMjIlM0UlM0NsaW5rJTIwcmVsJTNEc3R5bGVzaGVldCUyMGhyZ WYlM0QlMjJzdHlsZSUyRm1vbm9ib29rJTJGbWFpbi5jc3MlMjIlM0UlM0NoMSUzRVdpa2lwZW RpYSUzQyUyRmgxJTNFJTNDZm9ybSUyMGFjdGlvbiUzRCUyMndpa2klMkZTcGVjaWFsJTNBU2V hcmNoJTIyJTIwdGFyZ2V0JTNEJTIyX2NvbnRlbnQlMjIlM0UlM0NoNCUzRVNlYXJjaCUzQyUy Rmg0JTNFJTNDaW5wdXQlMjBuYW1lJTNEc2VhcmNoJTNFJTNDJTJGZm9ybSUzRSI%2BQWRkIFN pZGViYXI8L2E%2B
JesseW 02:07, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Clicking "Search" without entering any text should take you to an advanced seach screen (with the ability to limit by namespaces, etc.; the same screen you get when you type something in to search) rather than an oblique database error message. - Fastfission 05:39, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I have a proposal for a policy improvement; people who are looking for music-related information to make an article about should use CDNOW to find out about music albums and their notability. There is an article about a famous album series that is full of redlinks and hasn't been improved for so many months; click Jock Jams and improve it in any way you can. -- SuperDude 04:49, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
The search snippets are surrounded by 'small' tags, which are tiny and almost unreadable in the firefox browser. Are other people getting this? -- Quiddity 09:04, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I've been developing a page for a few weeks now, but neither the wiki- search nor Google can find it, using terms one might use to find such a page, or even searching for the specific name. If neither search engine can find the page, someone looking for information there would only find it if they happened upon a link on another page.
Is this because the page has only been started recently? How long before the searches will find the page? It doesn't make sense to me that there would be a time delay, but I cannot figure out any other explanation. Can someone explain? Thanks, Laszlo Panaflex 23:30, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
How often is it that you search for something but the good answers droown in redirected pages? My idea: figure out some way (at least give the option) to eliminate all redirected pages from searches. HereToHelp 23:10, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
While this page explains searching Wikipedia in full, it might be helpful if some simplified version were available, for new users in particular. If no-one objects I'd like to create a stub, at least. -- Ec5618 17:43, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
I am admin at the lingála wiki and I am contributor at the german and alemanic wikis. There is a problem with the search engin. When I cannot write the diacritics (as a user) or the use of diacritics is not know to all the users (not in german, french or english, but in alot of not teached languages (p.ex. kikongo, lingala, ciluba, kiswahili, ....), I cannot find an article. Example from the german wiki: If I search lingala, I am linked to the article Lingala. When I use the lingala spelling of lingala lingála there is one 7%-result (list of languages of the world). Example from the lingála wikipedia: If you are congolese and you don't no how to type ɔ and ɔ́ you cannot find the article about your country in your language: Kɔ́ngɔ - even there is in some older dictionarries the spelling Kongó. Well there is a possibility to make for each article 4 or 5 redirects with different spellings. In german there is a redirect from Fluß to Fluss, but one from Strasse to Straße. There is obviously no rule (in Germany and Austria: Fluß, Straße; in Switzerland and Liechtenstein Fluss, Strasse). If the wiki search engine could learn that letters with and withou diacritics are (more ore less) the same, that ɔ, ss and ɛ are similar than o, ß and e, it would be grat and very helpful.
-- Etienne 14:46, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
the search engine is very poor. a search for "Swallowed in the Sea", a song from coldplay, is nowhere in the first 10 results. 59.93.129.176 16:50, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
If you want, you can added this:
I've created a couple of articles such as Aleksandr Zinovyev, Mikhail Meltyukhov, Leonid Stolovich and Wilhelm Külz. But to my great astonishment, I recently discovered that none of them can be found by searching (if I just type the name of the article and press GO, then, of course it works, but if I press SEARCH, nothing is found). What's the matter??? Constanz - Talk 10:46, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
This is not the place to ask questions. Please see Wikipedia:Look it up if the article is confusing.
if all tests are normal why pregnency is not occuring?
It appears that the discussions of articles nominated for deletion are saved somewhere. How can I search for past article-for-deletion discussions? Kestenbaum 21:57, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
The new version of the front page will have a link called "Searching" to here, Wikipedia:Search. Because it now seems unlikely that a search box will be placed prominently on the new Main Page, a certain percentage of people, trying to search but not seeing the box on the left, will click on "Searching" and get to this page. Because of that, I think it makes sense for the top of this page to include a large and prominent search box, above the "Wikipedia contains articles..." paragraph. Any thoughts? zafiroblue05 | Talk 02:13, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea to me. It could definately be helpful for those poor lost and confused individuals. -- Paulie Peña 02:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
I always thought that bookmarklets were javascript code in a bookmark (the Bookmarklet wikipedia article says as much) and that the those Mozilla and other Gecko browsers called their keyword searches "Quicksearches." Therefore, shouldn't we change the headline "Search Wikipedia using a bookmarklet" to "Search Wikipedia using a Quicksearch" and mention "bookmarklets" under the "Javascript in Bookmarks" headline? Does anyone agree or disagree? -- Paulie Peña 02:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Please see Main Page/Development for more discussion on this page's current development. -- Quiddity 01:00, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Newbie question, sorry if it has been answered somewhere ... By default, it seems the searching returns the page with exact name (if exists) that matches the search text. Is there any preference setting to always return the list of all pages with names containing the search text instead? Thanks. -- Elo0000 23:11, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Comments?
Why doesn't Wikipedia integrate the Google search into the Wikipedia search function? Honestly, the search function is far and away the facet of Wikipedia that I have the most trouble with...Google offeres the "Did you mean to search..." function as well as the ability to find phrases, etc., etc., etc. Bottom line is that it's much better though...Anyone have any thoughts/ideas/answers? Jarfingle 09:54, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
Gotcha, is there a protal for requesting exceptions be made somewhere? I'd like to do what I can to change this... Jarfingle 03:35, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
The project page says that users can "Check or uncheck the tickbox 'List redirects' ... at the bottom of a search results page" but I'm not seeing any such box. Has this feature been removed? — Chris Chittleborough 01:12, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
what's up with the search engine link? it says that you are going to a page that is not involved with wikipedia, yet when you click on it, it takes you to another page on wikipedia. please fix. ill attempt to fix it........ - Bagel7
Person within and attached to a particular body
You might be interested to read this [3].
Dori | Talk 17:36, Mar 2, 2004 (UTC)
Back in October, I wrote new entries for Carl Spaatz and Lyman Lemnitzer. Today I decided to do a search and see if there were any mentions of their names that were not linked back to the main entries. I did, in fact, find two such mentions. But I also found that a google search under "Spaatz" or "Lemnitzer" failed to provide a hit on either of the main entries for these men. Obviously both names were mentioned several times in the relevant entry. Other entries with links to these entries were listed (such as List of people associated with World War II). Google even had the links from my user page which post-dated the creation of these entries. So why doesn't google pick up on them? MK 15:34 (EST) 30 November 2003
What am I doing wrong? I have started, written and saved a page. I then log out, clear the computer of cookies, and do a google search for the page I have written. Google finds it, but always opens it in the edit mode, rather than as a completed document. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong? Ragussa 13:25, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
moved from the Reference desk by IMSoP 17:26, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
Why is it that Wikipedia Talk pages are invisible to Google, even to Google searches within the Wikipedia domain?
So far as I know, they aren't. I've seen them come up in search results. Rick K 03:42, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
Specific example: The Talk page for the article egg white definitely contains the words albumin, albumen, Eiweiß, and Wikipedia, but when I searched in Google for "albumin albumen eiweiß wikipedia" only one page turned up, and it was most certainly not the page I was attempting to access via Google.
I have a question about the current Google/Wikipedia search engine, or comment. Namely, it seems to produce very inconsistent, incomplete, or paradoxical responses to inquiries. A few examples:
This is what I find most disconcerting about the search engine. Someone will look something up, not get any results, and just assume that it is not present in the wikipedia. They won't know the little tricks about following other search results, going to more "meta-" pages (e.g. in math, going to major mathematical pages and looking around), or typing in URLs directly. This doesn't give a bad impression to newcomers, but it certainly fails to take advantage of everything that IS here. And it's a major inconvenience to people who use the wiki.
I would like to know if I am the only user that this happens to. I only bring it up in the village pump because it has been a common, persistent, recurring problem for me ever since I started (or ever since the Google/wikipedia page came up). It's not just an isolated incident with a few searches. Revolver 15 Nov 2003
It seems to me it's been a while since Google updated its Wikipedia index. Is that our fault (i.e., did we accidentally tell its robots to go away in one of our files), or is it their fault, or is it my psychotic delusion? -- Someone else 11:22, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Maybe this is obvious and has been discussed before, but have we considered using an appropriate Google Search Appliance [6]. This is actual hardware that would need to be purchased that would sit in the racks of our servers and could be setup to index the entire Wikipedia every day. I don't know how expensive this solution is or whether "we" can afford it, but it looks like an ideal solution to the problem. Any comments? -- FrankH 17:24, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Has anyone explored the Atomz Search application? (see also their FAQ). I use the free Express version for my personal site, and it works very well, is extraordinarily customizable, easy to integrate into a site, and you control when content is indexed. I've seen it on many other pro sites as well. It's a pay service for sites with more than 500 pages (heh), and of course there's no pricing on their website -- it's ye olde "contact our sales staff" routine. It may be too pricey for a site as large and index-intensive as this one, but it should at least be worth exploring..... especially since the search application in hosted on their servers, not ours. And who knows, they may be willing to negotiate a deal with a site as prominent as ours is becoming. Perhaps Jimbo or someone else with an idea of how much we would be willing to spend to have a reliable internal search mechanism could contact them...? -- Catherine - talk 19:31, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm sure this must have cropped up before, but I can't find it; can anyone point me to a relevant discussion? Anyway, I did a search on Google today for Lucifer cipher, and in the top 10 results were no less than 7 mirrored copies of the Lucifer (cipher) page, but not the Wikipedia article itself, which surfaces at position 70. This seems to happen a lot for various articles, and is somewhat annoying (especially since the mirrored pages are out of date and advert-laden). Anything Wikipedia can do? Feel free to point me to the previous discussions... — Matt 13:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia would seem to be part of the "deep Web" and hence inaccessible to Google. That is, there isn't any static page that links to all the other pages (or a static tree of such links). So how does Google's spider find articles? Does it watch special:newpages, or does it have a Wikipedia-specific search procedure (perhaps based on special:allpages), or what? The speed with which new Wikipedia articles get indexed is astonishing.... Dpbsmith 16:11, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I wasn't sure about something, and wanted to bring it up here. Basically, mirror versions are appearing much higher in google than we are. The explanation people give for this is that they're somehow manipulating the pagerank system. My question is not "how" (I'm not technical enough to really grasp), but rather "Could we do this too?". [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 13:44, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
How could we do this without putting it in the article text? [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 19:42, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
<title>
, and presumably also in the meta tags. It could also be incorporated in small text at the bottom of the article.
— Chameleon
My page/
My talk 20:24, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)Wikipedia:Database download gives the technical reasons we are almost assured a low Google ranking: because we're database-bound, crawlers are restricted to one access per second. Our mirrors are typically flat HTML, so can be crawled much faster.
I suggest that there's not much point worrying about our Google ranking until we are confident we have the server power (enough Squid frontends, I would guess) to handle the traffic. Remember that the deal with Yahoo doubled our load in a week - David Gerard 10:40, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I just found my article on effeminacy on the free dictionary.com. I don't see where they referenced wikipedia nor myself. I wish I could get credit for all my hard work. WHEELER 23:58, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I would encourage everyone to submit the articles they care most about to DMOZ, the basis directory for Google and other search engines. This may eventually ameliorate some of the problems related to searchability. -- Stevietheman 17:39, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Is there a trick to googling information that is not Wikipedia-derived? I try searching "foo -wikipedia -gnu" but it still finds thefreedictionary, etc. even though thefreedictionary has the word wikipedia in it. I look online for information about something and I have to wade through 2 pages of non-obvious Wikipedia clones before I find something written by someone else. :-) - Omegatron 17:06, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)
Is anyone bothered by the fact that the 'pedia no longer appears anywhere near the top of searches in Google? When I put in Syagrius or magister militum I get any number of sites containing copies of the wiki text, but not this site itself - in these two cases I gave up looking. The info on these sites is presumably copied at some moment in time and therefore "frozen", and is therefore less likely to be accurate. Please forgive me if this is a subject that has been raised before, but I couldn't find any mention of it. Djnjwd 23:02, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)
There's discussion on this ongoing at Wikipedia:Send in the clones. [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 06:38, 2004 Aug 23 (UTC)
There is also a valuable discussion about problems with Google on Wikipedia:External search engines. Some of those discussions began last year, and it looks as though each intake of new editors asks the same questions - and gets the same answers! May I suggest these pages plus this current Parish Pump discussion are somehow consolidated (by an administrator?) and placed on the Community Portal page with a heading like 'Wikipedia and search engine difficulties'. That way we have somewhere to keep an eye on it. It might be noted in whatever welcome material we sent new editors to draw their attention it.
There are also the regular pages Search engines and Google which so far as I can see do not touch on this problem. Apwoolrich 13:20, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I tend to believe that there's also a software (Google compatibility) issue involved. I did a Google search for the first paragraph of our Cohortative mood article - it's a vanity thing, and Firefox make such searches very simple - and got three results: 2 from thefreedictionary.com (which does link to the Wikipedia article, although the article has been since moved) and one from wikiverse.org (which doesn't). This means that not only Google does not rank the Wikipedia article highly, it is also entirely unaware of its existence (the same can be asserted using a Google cache query). Worse still, particularly when Wikipedia's search is disabled, is that, naturally, Google is also unaware of the article when doing a Wikipedia-specific search. The article is also not particularly new; presumably, Google scans the Web every 30 days, and the article is seven months old. One reason for this (and for other issues) is possibly Wikipedia's Crawl-delay value set at robots.txt. While it not particularly high (in fact, it is minimal), Wikipedia is pretty big, which might discourage even usually-reliable Google. -- Itai 14:31, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Google Define (that is, typing "define:{term}" at a Google prompt brings up "definitions" (as Google sees it) for {term}. It frequently uses WP for these (if there is a WP entry for {term}, I've never *not* (forgive the double-negative) see Google Define pull it up. The problem is when one wants to click-through to the entry on WP. If it is a multi-word entry, the link is invariably malformed. Instead of using underscores ("_") for spaces in the WP link, Google uses plus signs ("+"), by which WP will fail to find the entry.
How to correct this?
1) Contact Google about this & get them to fix it.
2) Work around it when WP sees that an entry containing "+" is 404 & the link referrer is Google.
Attempts at correction:
1) I have been contacting Google for about 6 (six!) months (as of this entry), & they have not contacted me back. I have sent them about a dozen requests, but the links are still wrong.
2) This entry is my first step toward the second solution. I have no idea where else to begin, & I am hoping for feedback to point me in the right direction.
TSamuel ( talk) 20:44, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
http://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org&ns0=1&q=test&fulltext=Advanced+search lists http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/v:de:Kurs:Software-Test uh? -- 78.34.4.125 ( talk) 14:52, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
![]() | This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
I tried using the instructions for adding a Wikipedia Quick Shortcut to Opera 8, and it doesn't work at all. If I try typing in "w test" into my address bar, Opera tries to go to wtest.com.
For all people speaking more than one language, it would be a help if the search engine returns hits (no full text search, I think) from other languages, if no article is found. 192.33.101.239 14:23, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The search page's Google search form should be fixed to search en.wikipedia.org instead of www.wikipedia.org since most English pages are now indexed by Google at the new domain.
Why can't I find the word "self"? How is that badly formed?
== ignoring words ==]]]] While length is not a useful way to decide what goes in the index, as above postings have made clear, certainly the most common words should be excluded. But why not just ignore such words rather than force the user to delete them and try again? Google does this, simply informing the user on the results page that "XXX is a very common word and was ignored." -- Michael Shulman
To do this, I've have to include the entire MySQL stoplist in the Wikipedia software itself. I'm not sure that's worth the effort. LDC
I come from the German wikipedia, and that language has, like many others, diacritical letters, which are often expressed by some other means, e.g. use 'ss' instead the sharp s 'ß', or 'ae' instead of 'ä'. The situation is similar in Spanish (e.g., á é í ó ú), ... Names are often written in the spelling of the original language (Perón of Argentina), or simply as Peron.
i think that is one error to change artcyclopedia , because before i was able to find , for example :DAUBIGNY , at all museums of the world, please don´t change painters online, is the better of i never have seen in internet, , http://www.guillermograndal.com ,
Thus it would be great to have 'equivalent characters', which permit a user to say 'o' and 'ó' are to be treated identical in this search.
Have there been any thoughts in this direction? -- Schewek
Searching for Down fails. But not all four-letter searches fail. I know there's an entry labeled Down, why does the search fail? -- Zoe
I've mentioned the arbitrary length to Lee on the mailing list; he agreed that it was a problem (consider these searches: malcolm x, george w bush, pi). Anyway, he promised to look into it. Koyaanis Qatsi 16:54 Jul 22, 2002 (PDT)
You can find "blue", "fire", and "cats" just fine. And the new software produces useful results for "cat", "ct", and "pi". MySQL still won't index single letters, so "Malcolm X" does find "Malcolm X", but only because it finds every Malcolm. "Will" is a problem, because it is in MySQL stoplist, i.e., common words like "the" and "have" that are not indexed. That's the problem with "down" as well (though that makes a little less sense. I'm not sure what MySQL's criteria were for their stoplist). LDC
Oh, so you've fixed that already. I missed the announcement, sorry. Thanks for all your work, BTW. Koyaanis Qatsi
Wrote a page on will. Also wrote a page on poverty, but I'm worried about the fact that Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Mswake 12:31 Jul 26, 2002 (PDT)
Funny to find discussion on will (which, btw, you still can't find by searching) because I can't access my article on free will by searching. What gives?
Is there a way to search for phrases? Bob Jonkman
I don't really know about these things, so I won't do it myself, but should the link at the bottom of this page to Google reference wikipedia.org rather than wikipedia.com now? -- Camembert
Can anyone tell me exactly what to do to get mozilla to search wikipedia by default? --the semi-computer literate KQ
Add the Wikipedia (EN) search plugin, available at Mycroft site, then go to Edit->Preferences->Internet Search and make it your default plugin by selecting it from the dropdown list. :) -- Unforgettableid | talk to me 05:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
In order to make searching work reasonably, we have to be aware of American / British spelling differences. For example, if you search for "electronic colour code", you fail to find the article electronic color code, which was presumably originally written by a USAite. As the text is written, there is no conventient way to slip the word "colour" into the body of the text so that it gets found in a search.
I've tried adding text in html comments <!-- electronic colour code --> which seem to work as comments if on a line by themselves. but not if embedded mid paragraph. Search doesn't find them. Is there a way of adding "keywords" for searching to an article? Is there a way (like misspelling) of automatically making a search for either color or for colour actually search for "(color or colour)"? -- SGBailey 22:26 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
What do we do for "significant" search keywords which are not in the article name? As an *example* if there was an articel 'Famous actors', we might have text "theater" in the article but want "theatre" to also work in searches. -- SGBailey 22:57 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
Another one on searches: Try searching for the four colour theorem: The following are rejected by SQL:
yet the follwoing work:
Why? -- SGBailey 22:37 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
Can the search engine developers confirm this? And for SGBailey, Try Wikipedia:Searching -- User:kt2
Hi!
I'm puzzled by the search box at the bottom of each page. There are two words (to the right of the box) SEARCH and GO. But they seem to do the same thing. I've never seen two words to choose from on any other web site.Please explain!
Arpingstone 10:32 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)
There seems to be something wrong with the search engine. Not a major functional problem - it's finding things all right - just with the way it's displaying the results. It used to be that each item on the search results list would have the article title followed by an extract from the article with the search term/s highlighted; what I'm getting now is the article title followed by 50 characters from each of the first five lines of the article, which isn't often very helpful. Does anybody know what's going on? -- Paul A, 4 Feb 2003 8:30 UTC
It also seems to be displaying things in a different order. In fact, I can't work out the logic of the order it's displaying things at all. For example, I just searched for Lou Harrison, and the first fourteen article text results had "Lou" and "Harrison" in them, but not the whole phrase "Lou Harrison". As a result, a lot of irrelevant stuff is given prominence. Sorry if this has been brought up somewhere else, I've not spotted it. -- Camembert
rm acapedia, because the cached version redirects to the current wikipedia version for some links - MyRedDice
What do you mean? Google caches a 2nd copy of wikipedia articles through acapedia, as far as I have seen, and a better one: it does not have the problem that Google text interferes with the top of the article text. - Patrick 22:30 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)
It seems you have searched the whole web for the term "acapedia", but you have to search acapedia (take my link) for some other term, for example "rijngouwelijn". Then you get http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cof=&domains=acapedia.org&q=rijngouwelijn&btnG=Google+Search&sitesearch=acapedia.org
The second cached result is
which is better than
Congratulations on making the wikipedia totally unusable in all practical respects. If you can't search the database then what's the point in having one? I'm not going to bother writing article when nobody can find them for a month. Goodbye. KJ 01:12 Apr 4, 2003 (UTC)
It would be good if the wikipedia namespace would be included in the titles search when Wikipedia's internal full-text search facility is temporarily disabled.
Even when Wikipedia's internal full-text search facility is on, a title search option would be useful (faster if here are many hits in the full text).
Patrick 12:04 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)
I think this page is overly complicated, and the striked paragraphs make it even more confusing
A simple rewrite would be based on examples, possibly similar to the How to edit a page page.. I will try to simplify it.. -- Rotem Dan 21:22 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump
Is it just me, or is search completely broken at the moment (ie. returning no article title matches for keywords that I know should have matches)? -- rbrwr
Why is it that when I click the "go" button, it almost invariably takes me to the Talk page instead of to the article page? -- Zoe
The list of words not used in searches seems reasonable for words IN articles. Is there anyway that the search of article TITLES could use ALL words? -- 217.24.129.50
I'd like an easy way to search for articles containing the text "worcester" that do not link to Worcester, England, Worcester, Worcestershire, etc, so that I can link them properly (if relevant, of course). Is there any way to do this? Martin 18:45 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)
There is a typo on the search stub page that is in place while searching is disabled: "perfromance". I assume that text isn't accessible to ordinary Wikipedians, but if it is, just let me know how and I'll fix it. -- Jketola 21:05, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Full-text search is back up, with no apparent slowing of the server - what happened? Did a bug just get fixed? - Smack 05:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Can't you make searches non-case sensitive by default? Phys
Searching for abbreviations, such as "MP3" or "USA" doesn't work. Why is this?
Thanks, I'll remember that, though I still think this search engine desperately needs revising.
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, September 25th, 2003.
So when is it coming back? Wikipedia is virtually unusable without some kind of search capability. Even a link to Google would be nice, like the last time. RickK 19:47, 20 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Thursday, October 9th, 2003.
Why do I get so many 'server overloads' when I try searching for any article? It would seem to me that the problem may be lack of bandwidth. If that is the problem then why is it not being dealt with?
This is probably a simple data error, but I don't yet know how to fix it myself: When I enter "ct scan" in Wikipedia's mini-search bar I end up on "Ultrasound scan" (a related but different subject). There is a much more relevant page available, computed_axial_tomography. Searching for "CT scan" takes me there. Is it possible for a mere site-visitor to change where a search will take me? -- 195.22.85.154 14:43, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Back before the Wiki Search was taken down, there used to be a Search log, where we could see what things people were searching for. Is that still available? RickK 06:32, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Is the text search of Wikipedia permeanently disabled? Every single time I go to use it, it says:
Or am I doing something wrong? LUDRAMAN | T 17:31, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
As I understand it, search is supposed to be case-insensitive, as referenced in Wikipedia:Searching#Search_is_case-insensitive -- but when I search for "dj leslie", the DJ leslie entry doesn't come up. Am I missing something, or should I make a bug report? -- Twiin 15:22, 05 May, 2004 (UTC)
Full-text search appears to be working again, thanks to the new hardware. Very nice. Perhaps an announcement on Wikipedia:Announcements should be in order? - Plutor 19:27, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I miss the google search box, can we have that back as well as the wikipedia searching? Spare a thought for those who can't spell well Dmn 17:30, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps you misunderstand? I like how I could so quickly find articles w similar words, yet w different spellings, etc.. The old way of searching was just so handy, and the new way... not :*( Sam [ Spade] 00:46, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Exactly, I didn't mean to say it's bad to have the full text thing, I just don't prefer it in exclusion of the old google option. Google is more handy for finding similar spellings of a given search. Sam [ Spade] 04:53, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say! Sam [ Spade] 20:39, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I've discovered a cool way to directly go to Wikipedia articles from the IE address bar in Windows XP. First go here and download TweakUI.exe on the right-hand side:
Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP
Install it and then run it. Open the Internet Explorer node on the left side, then click Search. Click the Create button, and enter these in the fields:
Prefix: wp URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:search?search=%s&go=Go
For the politically-minded of us, you can create a similar shortcut for going to Wikipedia namespace articles, like this:
Prefix: wpw URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:search?search=Wikipedia: %s&go=Go
Then you can type, for example, "wp Wikipedia" in the address bar to visit the article on Wikipedia, or "wpw Village pump", for this page.
Deco 05:12, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
How to do the same thing in Mozilla, Firefox, etc.:
That's it-- you don't need to download anything. Marnanel 16:51, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Today is July 26, 2004 and I wanted to search the Wikipedia: namespace for articles on identity and anonymity. So I typed "anonymity" in the search box (I use the monobook skin) and clicked "Search" (not "Go"). This gave me a "Search results" page with dozens of irrelevant hits, most of which are not in the Wikipedia: namespace. But this was ok. At the bottom of the page was the form that I was looking for. I unchecked the Main namespace and all other namespaces and only checked the Wikipedia: namespace. In this form, there was no "Go" button, only a "Search" button. So I clicked it. And I immediately landed on the Main:Anonymity page, as if I had clicked a "Go" button. It turns out that the first HTML form had two <input type=submit> buttons. One with value=Go name=go and the other with value=Search name=fulltext. But the HTML form at the bottom of the Search results page had only one <input type=submit> button, featuring value=Search name=searchx. I think this "searchx" should be "fulltext" and that there should be a "go" button next to it. -- LA2 26 Jul 2004
Does anyone know why the default search (i.e. punching something into the text field and hitting "Search") searches Template Talk? -- Ben Brockert 21:55, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia_talk:Searching#Google_search seems to have a concensus of "lets bring back the google search". Sam [ Spade] 23:32, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
People are always quick to moan about what they've lost, but not so quick to cheer for what they've got. Is there any way of still using the Wikipedia search? It was always great for searching the wiki coding on each page. I now miss that.
SimonMayer 13:59, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
That is ok then. I was just concerned that we'd lost something important, but if it's on at late night, I'll cope.
SimonMayer 16:24, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I am currently, together with User:Sj, establishing the page Wikipedia:Tools. The goal is to given an overview of tools for browsing and editing the wikipedia. I would suggest to integrate some parts of this page into Wikipedia:Tools and link to that page here. Anyhow, it is important to coordinate the contents of this two pages, to avoid overlap and confusion. -- 217.82.181.205 23:57, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC) 23:34, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC) (that is de:Benutzer:Duesentrieb)
Why is it that the search function seems to be randomly disabled and enabled every day? One moment it works, then later the same day it just offers the Google/Yahoo search. Is this an automatic load-dependent regulation? Gzornenplatz 15:35, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
I removed this section because telling people to run a block of unreadable base64 code is not safe or wise. I don't have Firefox or Opera, so I can't test it, but when I un-base64'd and un-percent-quoted it, it didn't seem to have any problems, but still, since data scheme url's don't need to be in base64 it is better for readability for them not to be. Please find some safer way to write this; it is a good thing to have.
===Search Wikipedia from a sidebar tab=== Works with: Mozilla Firefox, Opera 7. Wikipedia can also be searched via a sidebar tab of its own. To install the tab, copy the text below into the web address bar and press Enter, then click "Add Sidebar": data:text/html;base64,PGEgcmVsPXNpZGViYXIgdGl0bGU9IlNlYXJjaCBXaWtpcGVkaWE iIGhyZWY9ImRhdGE6dGV4dC9odG1sLCUzQ2Jhc2UlMjBocmVmJTNEJTIyaHR0cCUzQSUyRiUy RmVuLndpa2lwZWRpYS5vcmclMjIlM0UlM0NsaW5rJTIwcmVsJTNEc3R5bGVzaGVldCUyMGhyZ WYlM0QlMjJzdHlsZSUyRm1vbm9ib29rJTJGbWFpbi5jc3MlMjIlM0UlM0NoMSUzRVdpa2lwZW RpYSUzQyUyRmgxJTNFJTNDZm9ybSUyMGFjdGlvbiUzRCUyMndpa2klMkZTcGVjaWFsJTNBU2V hcmNoJTIyJTIwdGFyZ2V0JTNEJTIyX2NvbnRlbnQlMjIlM0UlM0NoNCUzRVNlYXJjaCUzQyUy Rmg0JTNFJTNDaW5wdXQlMjBuYW1lJTNEc2VhcmNoJTNFJTNDJTJGZm9ybSUzRSI%2BQWRkIFN pZGViYXI8L2E%2B
JesseW 02:07, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Clicking "Search" without entering any text should take you to an advanced seach screen (with the ability to limit by namespaces, etc.; the same screen you get when you type something in to search) rather than an oblique database error message. - Fastfission 05:39, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I have a proposal for a policy improvement; people who are looking for music-related information to make an article about should use CDNOW to find out about music albums and their notability. There is an article about a famous album series that is full of redlinks and hasn't been improved for so many months; click Jock Jams and improve it in any way you can. -- SuperDude 04:49, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
The search snippets are surrounded by 'small' tags, which are tiny and almost unreadable in the firefox browser. Are other people getting this? -- Quiddity 09:04, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I've been developing a page for a few weeks now, but neither the wiki- search nor Google can find it, using terms one might use to find such a page, or even searching for the specific name. If neither search engine can find the page, someone looking for information there would only find it if they happened upon a link on another page.
Is this because the page has only been started recently? How long before the searches will find the page? It doesn't make sense to me that there would be a time delay, but I cannot figure out any other explanation. Can someone explain? Thanks, Laszlo Panaflex 23:30, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
How often is it that you search for something but the good answers droown in redirected pages? My idea: figure out some way (at least give the option) to eliminate all redirected pages from searches. HereToHelp 23:10, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
While this page explains searching Wikipedia in full, it might be helpful if some simplified version were available, for new users in particular. If no-one objects I'd like to create a stub, at least. -- Ec5618 17:43, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
I am admin at the lingála wiki and I am contributor at the german and alemanic wikis. There is a problem with the search engin. When I cannot write the diacritics (as a user) or the use of diacritics is not know to all the users (not in german, french or english, but in alot of not teached languages (p.ex. kikongo, lingala, ciluba, kiswahili, ....), I cannot find an article. Example from the german wiki: If I search lingala, I am linked to the article Lingala. When I use the lingala spelling of lingala lingála there is one 7%-result (list of languages of the world). Example from the lingála wikipedia: If you are congolese and you don't no how to type ɔ and ɔ́ you cannot find the article about your country in your language: Kɔ́ngɔ - even there is in some older dictionarries the spelling Kongó. Well there is a possibility to make for each article 4 or 5 redirects with different spellings. In german there is a redirect from Fluß to Fluss, but one from Strasse to Straße. There is obviously no rule (in Germany and Austria: Fluß, Straße; in Switzerland and Liechtenstein Fluss, Strasse). If the wiki search engine could learn that letters with and withou diacritics are (more ore less) the same, that ɔ, ss and ɛ are similar than o, ß and e, it would be grat and very helpful.
-- Etienne 14:46, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
the search engine is very poor. a search for "Swallowed in the Sea", a song from coldplay, is nowhere in the first 10 results. 59.93.129.176 16:50, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
If you want, you can added this:
I've created a couple of articles such as Aleksandr Zinovyev, Mikhail Meltyukhov, Leonid Stolovich and Wilhelm Külz. But to my great astonishment, I recently discovered that none of them can be found by searching (if I just type the name of the article and press GO, then, of course it works, but if I press SEARCH, nothing is found). What's the matter??? Constanz - Talk 10:46, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
This is not the place to ask questions. Please see Wikipedia:Look it up if the article is confusing.
if all tests are normal why pregnency is not occuring?
It appears that the discussions of articles nominated for deletion are saved somewhere. How can I search for past article-for-deletion discussions? Kestenbaum 21:57, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
The new version of the front page will have a link called "Searching" to here, Wikipedia:Search. Because it now seems unlikely that a search box will be placed prominently on the new Main Page, a certain percentage of people, trying to search but not seeing the box on the left, will click on "Searching" and get to this page. Because of that, I think it makes sense for the top of this page to include a large and prominent search box, above the "Wikipedia contains articles..." paragraph. Any thoughts? zafiroblue05 | Talk 02:13, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea to me. It could definately be helpful for those poor lost and confused individuals. -- Paulie Peña 02:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
I always thought that bookmarklets were javascript code in a bookmark (the Bookmarklet wikipedia article says as much) and that the those Mozilla and other Gecko browsers called their keyword searches "Quicksearches." Therefore, shouldn't we change the headline "Search Wikipedia using a bookmarklet" to "Search Wikipedia using a Quicksearch" and mention "bookmarklets" under the "Javascript in Bookmarks" headline? Does anyone agree or disagree? -- Paulie Peña 02:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Please see Main Page/Development for more discussion on this page's current development. -- Quiddity 01:00, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Newbie question, sorry if it has been answered somewhere ... By default, it seems the searching returns the page with exact name (if exists) that matches the search text. Is there any preference setting to always return the list of all pages with names containing the search text instead? Thanks. -- Elo0000 23:11, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Comments?
Why doesn't Wikipedia integrate the Google search into the Wikipedia search function? Honestly, the search function is far and away the facet of Wikipedia that I have the most trouble with...Google offeres the "Did you mean to search..." function as well as the ability to find phrases, etc., etc., etc. Bottom line is that it's much better though...Anyone have any thoughts/ideas/answers? Jarfingle 09:54, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
Gotcha, is there a protal for requesting exceptions be made somewhere? I'd like to do what I can to change this... Jarfingle 03:35, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
The project page says that users can "Check or uncheck the tickbox 'List redirects' ... at the bottom of a search results page" but I'm not seeing any such box. Has this feature been removed? — Chris Chittleborough 01:12, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
what's up with the search engine link? it says that you are going to a page that is not involved with wikipedia, yet when you click on it, it takes you to another page on wikipedia. please fix. ill attempt to fix it........ - Bagel7
Person within and attached to a particular body
You might be interested to read this [3].
Dori | Talk 17:36, Mar 2, 2004 (UTC)
Back in October, I wrote new entries for Carl Spaatz and Lyman Lemnitzer. Today I decided to do a search and see if there were any mentions of their names that were not linked back to the main entries. I did, in fact, find two such mentions. But I also found that a google search under "Spaatz" or "Lemnitzer" failed to provide a hit on either of the main entries for these men. Obviously both names were mentioned several times in the relevant entry. Other entries with links to these entries were listed (such as List of people associated with World War II). Google even had the links from my user page which post-dated the creation of these entries. So why doesn't google pick up on them? MK 15:34 (EST) 30 November 2003
What am I doing wrong? I have started, written and saved a page. I then log out, clear the computer of cookies, and do a google search for the page I have written. Google finds it, but always opens it in the edit mode, rather than as a completed document. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong? Ragussa 13:25, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
moved from the Reference desk by IMSoP 17:26, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
Why is it that Wikipedia Talk pages are invisible to Google, even to Google searches within the Wikipedia domain?
So far as I know, they aren't. I've seen them come up in search results. Rick K 03:42, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
Specific example: The Talk page for the article egg white definitely contains the words albumin, albumen, Eiweiß, and Wikipedia, but when I searched in Google for "albumin albumen eiweiß wikipedia" only one page turned up, and it was most certainly not the page I was attempting to access via Google.
I have a question about the current Google/Wikipedia search engine, or comment. Namely, it seems to produce very inconsistent, incomplete, or paradoxical responses to inquiries. A few examples:
This is what I find most disconcerting about the search engine. Someone will look something up, not get any results, and just assume that it is not present in the wikipedia. They won't know the little tricks about following other search results, going to more "meta-" pages (e.g. in math, going to major mathematical pages and looking around), or typing in URLs directly. This doesn't give a bad impression to newcomers, but it certainly fails to take advantage of everything that IS here. And it's a major inconvenience to people who use the wiki.
I would like to know if I am the only user that this happens to. I only bring it up in the village pump because it has been a common, persistent, recurring problem for me ever since I started (or ever since the Google/wikipedia page came up). It's not just an isolated incident with a few searches. Revolver 15 Nov 2003
It seems to me it's been a while since Google updated its Wikipedia index. Is that our fault (i.e., did we accidentally tell its robots to go away in one of our files), or is it their fault, or is it my psychotic delusion? -- Someone else 11:22, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Maybe this is obvious and has been discussed before, but have we considered using an appropriate Google Search Appliance [6]. This is actual hardware that would need to be purchased that would sit in the racks of our servers and could be setup to index the entire Wikipedia every day. I don't know how expensive this solution is or whether "we" can afford it, but it looks like an ideal solution to the problem. Any comments? -- FrankH 17:24, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
Has anyone explored the Atomz Search application? (see also their FAQ). I use the free Express version for my personal site, and it works very well, is extraordinarily customizable, easy to integrate into a site, and you control when content is indexed. I've seen it on many other pro sites as well. It's a pay service for sites with more than 500 pages (heh), and of course there's no pricing on their website -- it's ye olde "contact our sales staff" routine. It may be too pricey for a site as large and index-intensive as this one, but it should at least be worth exploring..... especially since the search application in hosted on their servers, not ours. And who knows, they may be willing to negotiate a deal with a site as prominent as ours is becoming. Perhaps Jimbo or someone else with an idea of how much we would be willing to spend to have a reliable internal search mechanism could contact them...? -- Catherine - talk 19:31, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm sure this must have cropped up before, but I can't find it; can anyone point me to a relevant discussion? Anyway, I did a search on Google today for Lucifer cipher, and in the top 10 results were no less than 7 mirrored copies of the Lucifer (cipher) page, but not the Wikipedia article itself, which surfaces at position 70. This seems to happen a lot for various articles, and is somewhat annoying (especially since the mirrored pages are out of date and advert-laden). Anything Wikipedia can do? Feel free to point me to the previous discussions... — Matt 13:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)
Wikipedia would seem to be part of the "deep Web" and hence inaccessible to Google. That is, there isn't any static page that links to all the other pages (or a static tree of such links). So how does Google's spider find articles? Does it watch special:newpages, or does it have a Wikipedia-specific search procedure (perhaps based on special:allpages), or what? The speed with which new Wikipedia articles get indexed is astonishing.... Dpbsmith 16:11, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I wasn't sure about something, and wanted to bring it up here. Basically, mirror versions are appearing much higher in google than we are. The explanation people give for this is that they're somehow manipulating the pagerank system. My question is not "how" (I'm not technical enough to really grasp), but rather "Could we do this too?". [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 13:44, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
How could we do this without putting it in the article text? [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 19:42, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)
<title>
, and presumably also in the meta tags. It could also be incorporated in small text at the bottom of the article.
— Chameleon
My page/
My talk 20:24, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)Wikipedia:Database download gives the technical reasons we are almost assured a low Google ranking: because we're database-bound, crawlers are restricted to one access per second. Our mirrors are typically flat HTML, so can be crawled much faster.
I suggest that there's not much point worrying about our Google ranking until we are confident we have the server power (enough Squid frontends, I would guess) to handle the traffic. Remember that the deal with Yahoo doubled our load in a week - David Gerard 10:40, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I just found my article on effeminacy on the free dictionary.com. I don't see where they referenced wikipedia nor myself. I wish I could get credit for all my hard work. WHEELER 23:58, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I would encourage everyone to submit the articles they care most about to DMOZ, the basis directory for Google and other search engines. This may eventually ameliorate some of the problems related to searchability. -- Stevietheman 17:39, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Is there a trick to googling information that is not Wikipedia-derived? I try searching "foo -wikipedia -gnu" but it still finds thefreedictionary, etc. even though thefreedictionary has the word wikipedia in it. I look online for information about something and I have to wade through 2 pages of non-obvious Wikipedia clones before I find something written by someone else. :-) - Omegatron 17:06, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)
Is anyone bothered by the fact that the 'pedia no longer appears anywhere near the top of searches in Google? When I put in Syagrius or magister militum I get any number of sites containing copies of the wiki text, but not this site itself - in these two cases I gave up looking. The info on these sites is presumably copied at some moment in time and therefore "frozen", and is therefore less likely to be accurate. Please forgive me if this is a subject that has been raised before, but I couldn't find any mention of it. Djnjwd 23:02, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)
There's discussion on this ongoing at Wikipedia:Send in the clones. [[User:Meelar| Meelar (talk)]] 06:38, 2004 Aug 23 (UTC)
There is also a valuable discussion about problems with Google on Wikipedia:External search engines. Some of those discussions began last year, and it looks as though each intake of new editors asks the same questions - and gets the same answers! May I suggest these pages plus this current Parish Pump discussion are somehow consolidated (by an administrator?) and placed on the Community Portal page with a heading like 'Wikipedia and search engine difficulties'. That way we have somewhere to keep an eye on it. It might be noted in whatever welcome material we sent new editors to draw their attention it.
There are also the regular pages Search engines and Google which so far as I can see do not touch on this problem. Apwoolrich 13:20, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I tend to believe that there's also a software (Google compatibility) issue involved. I did a Google search for the first paragraph of our Cohortative mood article - it's a vanity thing, and Firefox make such searches very simple - and got three results: 2 from thefreedictionary.com (which does link to the Wikipedia article, although the article has been since moved) and one from wikiverse.org (which doesn't). This means that not only Google does not rank the Wikipedia article highly, it is also entirely unaware of its existence (the same can be asserted using a Google cache query). Worse still, particularly when Wikipedia's search is disabled, is that, naturally, Google is also unaware of the article when doing a Wikipedia-specific search. The article is also not particularly new; presumably, Google scans the Web every 30 days, and the article is seven months old. One reason for this (and for other issues) is possibly Wikipedia's Crawl-delay value set at robots.txt. While it not particularly high (in fact, it is minimal), Wikipedia is pretty big, which might discourage even usually-reliable Google. -- Itai 14:31, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Google Define (that is, typing "define:{term}" at a Google prompt brings up "definitions" (as Google sees it) for {term}. It frequently uses WP for these (if there is a WP entry for {term}, I've never *not* (forgive the double-negative) see Google Define pull it up. The problem is when one wants to click-through to the entry on WP. If it is a multi-word entry, the link is invariably malformed. Instead of using underscores ("_") for spaces in the WP link, Google uses plus signs ("+"), by which WP will fail to find the entry.
How to correct this?
1) Contact Google about this & get them to fix it.
2) Work around it when WP sees that an entry containing "+" is 404 & the link referrer is Google.
Attempts at correction:
1) I have been contacting Google for about 6 (six!) months (as of this entry), & they have not contacted me back. I have sent them about a dozen requests, but the links are still wrong.
2) This entry is my first step toward the second solution. I have no idea where else to begin, & I am hoping for feedback to point me in the right direction.
TSamuel ( talk) 20:44, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
http://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org&ns0=1&q=test&fulltext=Advanced+search lists http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/v:de:Kurs:Software-Test uh? -- 78.34.4.125 ( talk) 14:52, 31 January 2009 (UTC)