Wine-wiki.org:Searching
From Wine-Wiki
To search Wine-Wiki:
- In the small search box at the side of the screen, marked search, followed by Go and Search.
The difference between Go (same as enter) and Search is that Go first looks for an article with the given string as its title, and if one is found immediately goes to the indicated article. If Go fails to find an article, it then automatically executes Search which is a full-text search for the given words.
Brief tips for searching:
- 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.
- While Go is usually, but not always, case insensitive, Search is always case insensitive. More detail about case sensitivity is provided below.
- Search is a treated as a secondary function of MediaWiki software. Currently the search function is limited to words longer than 3 letters though a somewhat future media wiki update holds the promise of a search function that indexes 2- and 3-letter words. Until then, if you can't find something you're expecting to find, please try an External Search Engine.
Various search engines can provide domain-specific searches, which lets you achieve a better search. Searches are based on the text as shown by the browser. In general, external search engines are faster than a Wikipedia search. However, because the search engine's cache is based on when the site was indexed, the search may not return newly created pages and any cached versions of the page may not be as up-to-date as the link to wiki itself. Because regular searches (because of search engine optimization techniques) may or may not list this wiki, links are provided below that will search this wiki site.
Contents |
Media Wiki Search
This is the default box on the left hand side.
Limiting results
Our 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. Unfortunately because of this being a keyword, some searches about winedebug traces may be best using one of the external search links below.
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 completely 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 or use one of the external search links below.
Case sensitivity
Search is always case-insensitive, so searches for "DirectX" "directx" and "DIRECTX" 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. Go is case-sensitive only if an article has a name including a mixture of capitalized and uncapitalized letters and is neither all initial cap or all lower case following the first word. For example, consider the article Wine DirectX status. Entering 'wine directx status' and pressing "enter" or Go will not take the reader to this article. However, 'Wine DirectX status' will work, as will 'wine DirectX Status'. If the article name were 'Wine DirectX Status' or 'Wine directx status' entering any capitalization variant would suffice. Redirects can be used to work around this problem so that searches for any miscapitalization redirects the user to the actual article.
External Search Engines
By following the links below, you can use the Google search engine
If you frequently search via Google, consider installing the Google Toolbar. Using the "search this site" button allows you to quickly search this Wiki. 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 Wikipedia - 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 this wiki. The official Yahoo! Companion Toolbar is only for Windows with Internet Explorer and Mozilla.
If you cannot find an appropriate page
If there is no appropriate page on wine-wiki, consider creating a page, since you can edit the wiki right now. Or consider adding what you were looking for to the Wanted articles page.
