Editing Help:Searching

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The quickest way to find information in MediaWiki is to look it up directly. On the left-hand side of your screen there is a '''Search''' box with two buttons under it labeled "Go" and "Search". 

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Put your keyword in the searchbox.
* '''Go''' - (or ''Enter'' on keyboard) will take you straight to the requested article, if it exists. If the page you looked for does not exist, it will instead do a standard search on the text, and you may be given the option to create the page.
* '''Search''' - will search the text in all the articles on the site(with some restrictions, see below) and provides you with a list of every article that contains your text. You will end up at the same search page if you use the go function but "go" is unable to find any matching articles.
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Note: In both case you can use th 'Auto complete' functionality and that Article names are Case sensitive. 

== How it works ==
Here's how the search works:

* Only the article content is searched - the page title is ignored.
* The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e. it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click 'edit', not the rendered page.  This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
* Even if you enclose a phrase in quotes, the search looks for each word individually.  e.g. if you enter "world war 2" it will return pages that contain "world" and "war" and "2".
* The search is not case-sensitive, so "MediaWiki", "mediawiki" and "MEDIAWIKI" all give the same result.

== Restricting the search ==
By default only the [[Help:namespaces|namespaces]] specified in your [[Help:preferences|preferences]] will be searched.  Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default, or if you just want to specify different namespaces for a single search then you can do so on the search results page.


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[[Category:Help|Searching]]