Help:Search

Help:Searching on Wikipedia Help:Searching on Mediawiki Help:Searching on CirrusSearch

File:CirrusSearch.png

CirrusSearch logo

File:Location of search bar.png

Location of search bar on pages

Saintapedia's search can be used to locate material on Saintapedia. The search bar, that is located at the top right on every page, is a little different that most search engines. As you begin typing, it will automatically give you a list of recommended Saintapedia pages weighted by relevance. When you hit enter, if a page's title matches what you entered in the search bar, Saintapedia will take you to the article that matches your query; otherwise it displays a more typical list of search results.

Search results will often be accompanied by various preliminary reports including Did you mean (spelling correction), and, when no results would otherwise be found it will say Showing results for (query correction) search instead for (your query).

Search features, many which can be done using the AdvancedSearch form, also include:

• sorting navigation suggestions by the number of incoming links.
• Starting with the tilde character ~ to disable navigation and suggestions in such a way that also preserves page ranking.
• Smart-matching characters by normalizing (or "folding") non-keyboard characters into keyboard characters.
• Words and phrases that match are highlighted in bold on the search results page.
• Ability to search within PDFs with machine readable text (non-image PDFs)
• Fuzzy searches and wildcard searches will be improved (Words, phrases, and modifiers)
• Some spelling correction using the "Did you mean?"
  • Example - When searching for "secratary," it gives the searcher "Showing results for secretary. Search instead for secratary."
• Ability to look for pages in specific categories (incategory), have a template (hastemplate), or pages that link to a page (Linksto)
• When you start typing in the search box, the article suggestions are sort by article quality. Those suggestions should take into account the number of incoming wikilinks, the size of the page, the number of external links, the number of headings, and the number of redirects.
• Look for similar pages (Morelike), have text in the page title (intitle), or search subpages (recommended mainly for Portals)
  • Examples - morelike:YouTube, morelike:YouTube|Contribution score, subpageof:"Training (Saintapedia)", and portal:subpageof:"Help"
• Search the uploaded files by size (filesize), type (filetype), file format (filemime), or other measurements (File measures )
  • Examples - filesize:<10240, filetype:video, filemime:svg, and filewidth:1024
• Expanding templates, meaning that all content from a template is now reflected in search results.
• Faster updates to the search index, meaning changes to articles are reflected in search results much faster.

To perform a full text search:

1. click on the magnifying glass or go Special:Search
2. enter your search terms in the text box

The search's back end is Elasticsearch using the CirrusSearch MediaWiki extension.

How it works

Enter key words and phrases and press

• ↵ Enter or Return on your keyboard
• or click the magnifying glass icon, Search, or Go button

If a page has the same title as what you entered you will be directed to that page otherwise, it searches all pages on the wiki, and presents a list of articles that matched your search terms, or a message informing you that no page has all the key words and phrases.

If you click the "search" button without filling in anything, you will be taken to "Special:Search" which gives you extra searching options (also available from any search results list)

You may find it useful to restrict a search to pages within a particular namespace e.g., only search within the user pages.

Check the namespaces you require for this search.

By default only the namespaces specified in your preferences will be searched.

Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default.

This can be done by selecting and deselecting boxes in the ”search” section of user preferences.

Adding additional default namespaces has a side effect of changing the autocomplete algorithm from the default to a somewhat stricter algorithm.

The AdvancedSearch adds an improved interface to the search page allowing the use of several options described above in a user-friendly manner. See Help:Extension:AdvancedSearch  for more details.

Defaults

By default, only articles in the following namespaces will be searched:

• Main (no prefix): contains all earticles, lists, disambiguation pages, and redirects. Sometimes referred to as "mainspace".
• Comment Streams

You can expand the search to also include:

• User (prefix User:): contains user pages and other pages created by individual users for their own personal use. Pages under this namespace can still be viewed and modified by others, so do not keep any of your sensitive data here.
• Saintapedia (prefix Saintapedia:): contains many types of pages connected with the Saintapedia project itself.
• Template (prefix Template:): contains templates – pages that are intended primarily to be transcluded or substituted onto other pages to insert standard text or boxes such as infoboxes and navigation boxes.
• Help (prefix Help:): contains pages which provide help in using Saintapedia and its software, both for users of the collaboration tool and for editors.
• File prefix File:): contains file description pages (see Help:File page for image, videos or audio files, with links to the files themselves. Saintapedia will not search the text of file themselves which is why adding a file description/summary to the file page is so important.
• MediaWiki (prefix MediaWiki:): a namespace containing interface texts, such as the links and messages that appear on automatically generated pages. Pages in this namespace are permanently protected. For a list of these messages, see Special:AllMessages.
• Category (prefix Category:): contains category pages, which display a list of pages and subcategories that have been added to a particular category, and optional additional text.

When you are logged into Saintapedia, you can change the default namespaces Saintapedia searches in your preferences under "Search options."

Using the search to directly get to a page

When using the search to directly get to a page, it doesn't matter whether you enter capitals or lower case letters (unless there are two article titles which differ only in capitalization). Umlauts and accents are also disregarded, but ligatures do not match the separate letters.

How frequently is the search index updated?

Updates to the search index are done in near real time.

Changes to pages should appear immediately in the search results.

Changes to templates should take effect in articles that include the template in a few minutes.

The templates changes use the job queue, so performance may vary.

A Purge to the article will force the change through, but that shouldn't be required if everything is going well.

Search suggestions

The search suggestions you get when you type into the search box that drops down candidate pages is sorted by a rough measure of article quality.

This takes into account the number of incoming wikilinks, the size of the page, the number of external links, the number of headings, and the number of redirects.

Search suggestions can be skipped and queries will go directly to the search results page. Add a tilde ~ before the query. Example "~Frida Kahlo". The search suggestions will still appear, but hitting the Enter key at any time will take you to the search results page.

ASCII/accents/diacritics folding is turned on for English text, but there are some formatting problems with the result. See T54656.

Full text search

A "full text search" is an "indexed search". All pages are stored in the wiki database, and all the words in the non-redirect pages are stored in the search database, which is an index to practically the full text of the wiki. Each visible word is indexed to the list of pages where it is found, so a search for a word is as fast as looking up a single-record. Furthermore, for any changes in wording, the search index is updated within seconds.

There are many indexes of the "full text" of the wiki to facilitate the many types of searches needed. The full wikitext is indexed many times into many special-purpose indexes, each parsing the wikitext in whatever way optimizes their use. Example indexes include:

• "auxiliary" text, includes hatnotes, captions, ToC, and any wikitext classed by an HTML attribute "class=searchaux".
• "Lead-in" text is the wikitext between the top of the page and the first heading.
• The "category" text indexes the listings at the bottom.
• Templates are indexed. If the transcluded words of a template change, then all the pages that transclude it are updated. (This can take a long time depending on a job queue.) If the subtemplates used by a template change, the index is updated.
• Document contents that are stored in the File/Media namespace are now indexed. Thousands of formats are recognized, including PDFs.

There is support for dozens of languages, but all languages are wanted. There is a list of currently supported languages at elasticsearch.org; see their documentation on contributing to submit requests or patches.

CirrusSearch will optimize your query, and run it. The resulting titles are weighted by relevance, and heavily post-processed, 20 at a time, for the search results page. For example snippets are garnered from the article, and search terms are highlighted in bold text.

Search results will often be accompanied by various preliminary reports. These include Did you mean (spelling correction), and, when no results would otherwise be found it will say Showing results for (query correction) and search instead for (your query).

Search features also include:

• Sorting navigation suggestions by the number of incoming links.
• Starting with the tilde character ~ to disable navigation and suggestions in such a way that also preserves page ranking.
• Smart-matching characters by normalizing (or "folding") non-keyboard characters into keyboard characters.

• Words and phrases that match are highlighted in bold on the search results page. The highlighter is a cosmetic analyzer, while the search-indexing analyzer actually finds the page, and these may not be 100% in sync, especially for regex. The highlighter can match more or less accurately than the indexer.

Words, phrases, and modifiers

The basic search term is a word or a "phrase in quotes". Search recognizes a "word" to be:

• a string of digits
• a string of letters
• subwords between letters/digit transitions, such as in txt2regex
• subwords inside a compoundName using Camel case

A "stop word" is a word that is ignored (because it is common, or for other reasons). A given search term matches against content (rendered on the page). To match against wikitext instead, use the insource search parameter (See section below). Each search parameter has its own index, and interpret its given term in its own way.

Spacing between words, phrases, parameters, and input to parameters, can include generous instances of whitespace and greyspace characters. "Greyspace characters" are all the non-alphanumeric characters ~!@#$%^&()_+-={}|[]\:";'<>?,./. A mixed string of greyspace characters and whitespace characters, is "greyspace", and is treated as one big word boundary. Greyspace is how indexes are made and queries are interpreted.

Two exceptions are where 1) an embedded:colon is one word (it being treated as a letter), and 2) an embedded comma , such as in 1,2,3, is treated as a number. Greyspace characters are otherwise ignored unless, due to query syntax, they can be interpreted as modifier characters.

The modifiers are ~ * \? - " ! . Depending on their placement in the syntax they can apply to a term, a parameter, or to an entire query. Word and phrase modifiers are the wildcard, proximity, and fuzzy searches. Each parameter can have their own modifiers, but in general:

• A fuzzy-word or fuzzy-phrase search can suffix a tilde ~ character (and a number telling the degree).
• A tilde ~ character prefixed to the first term of a query guarantees search results instead of any possible navigation.
• A wildcard character inside a word can be a (escaped) question mark \? for one character or an asterisk * character for more.
• Truth-logic can interpret AND and OR, but parameters cannot. Note that the AND and OR operators currently do not function in the traditional truth-logic manner! For details see more on logical operators.
• Truth-logic understands - or ! prefixed to a term to invert the usual meaning of the term from "match" to "exclude".

• Quotes around words mark an "exact phrase" search. For parameters they are also needed to delimit multi-word input.
• Stemming is automatic but can be turned off using an "exact phrase".

A phrase search can be initiated by various hints to the search engine. Each method of hinting has a side-effect of how tolerant the matching of the word sequence will be. For greyspace, camelCase, or txt2number hints:

• given words-joined_by_greyspace(characters) or wordsJoinedByCamelCaseCharacters it finds words joined by ... characters, in their bare forms or greyspace forms.
• txt2number will match txt 2 number or txt-2.number.
• Stop words are enabled for the edge cases (in the periphery) of a grey_space or camelCase phrase. An example using the, of, and a is that the_invisible_hand_of_a matches meetings invisible hand shake.

A "search instead" report is triggered when a universally unknown word is ignored in a phrase.

Each one of the following types of phrase-matching contains and widens the match-tolerances of the previous one:

• An "exact phrase" "in quotes" will tolerate (match with) greyspace. Given "exact_phrase" or "exact phrase" it matches "exact]phrase".

• A greyspace_phrase initiates stemming and stop word checks.

• Given CamelCase it will additionally match camelcase, in all lowercase, because CirrusSearch is not case sensitive in matching.

Page ranking saves you from typing quotes for a two-word search. With no quotes a word-pair index is used in page-ranking, plus it finds the two words anywhere on the page.

Some parameters interpret greyspace phrases, but other parameters, like insource only interpret the usual "phrase in quotes".

Search phrase	parserfunction	parserFunction	parser function	parser-function	parser:function	parSer:funcTion
parserfunction	✔	✔	N	N	N	N
"parser function"	N	N	✔	✔	N	N
parser_function	N	✔	✔	✔	N	N
parserFunction	✔	✔	✔	✔	N	N
"parser:function"	N	N	N	N	✔	✔
"parser_function"	N	N	✔	✔	N	N
"parSer_funcTion"	N	N	✔	✔	N	N
parSer_FuncTion	N	N	✔	✔	✔	✔

Note that all stemming is case insensitive.

Note how the "exact phrase" search interpreted the embedded:colon character as a letter, but not the embedded_underscore character. A similar event occurs with the comma , character inside a number.

Given in:this:word, CirrusSearch, when in an "exact phrase" context, (which includes the insource parameter context), will not match in, this, or word, but will then only match in:this:word.

Otherwise, remember that for CirrusSearch words are letters, numbers, or a combination of the two, and case does not matter.

The common word search employs the space character and is aggressive with stemming, and when the same words are joined by greyspace characters or camelCase they are aggressive with phrases and subwords.

When common words like "of" or "the" are included in a greyspace-phrase, they are ignored, so as to match more aggressively.

A greyspace_phrase search term, or a camelCase, or a txt2number term, match the signified words interchangeably. You can use any of those three forms. Now camelcase matches camelCase because Search is not case sensitive, but camelCase matches camelcase because camelCase is more aggressive. Like the rest of Search, subword "words" are not case-sensitive. By comparison the "exact phrase" is greyspace oriented and ignores numeric or letter-case transitions, and stemming. "Quoted phrases" are not case sensitive.

From the table we can surmise that the basic search parser_function -"parser function" is the sum of the basic searches parserFunction and parser<stems> function<stems>.

Making inquiries with numbers, we would find that:

• Plan9 or Plan_9 matches any of: plan9, plans 9, planned 9th, (planned) 9.2, "plans" (9:24)
• "plan9" only matches plan9 (case insensitive)
• Plan*9 matches plan9 or planet4589.

The star * wildcard matches a string of letters and digits within a rendered word, but never the beginning character. One or more characters, a percentage of the word, must precede the * character.

• If the leading part is only letters then it will limit a match to a string of (zero of more) letters.
• If only numbers, then it will limit a match to a sequence of (zero or more) numbers, including also ordinal letters (st, nd, rd), capital letters, or time abbreviations (am or pm); and it will match the entirety of (both sides of) a decimal numbers.
• Otherwise the comma is considered part of one number, but the decimal point is considered a greyspace character, and will delimit two numbers.
• Inside an "exact phrase" it matches stemming plus compounding.

The \? wildcard represents one letter or number; The *\? is also accepted, but \?* is not recognized.

The wildcards are for basic word, phrase, and insource searches, and may also be an alternative to (some) advanced regex searches (covered later).

Putting a tilde ~ character after a word or phrase activates a fuzzy search.

• For a phrase it is termed a proximity search, because proximal words are tolerated to an approximate rather than exact phrase.
• For example, "exact one two phrase"~2 matches exact phrase.
• For a word it means extra characters or changed characters.
• For a phrase a fuzzy search requires a whole number telling it how many extra words to fit in, but for a word a fuzzy search can have a decimal fraction, defaulting to word~0.5 (word~.5), where at most two letters can be found swapped, changed, or added, but never the first two letters.
• For a proximity phrase, a large number can be used, but that is an "expensive" (slow) search.
• For a word word~2 is most fuzzy with an edit distance of 2 (default), and word~1 is least fuzzy, and word~0 is not fuzzy at all.

	flowers algernon	Flowers for Algernon	flowers are for Algernon	Flowers a1 2b 3c 4f 5j 6l 7j 8p q9 z10 for Algernon
"flowers algernon"	Y	N	N	N
"flowers algernon"~0	Y	N	N	N
"flowers algernon"~1	Y	Y	N	N
"flowers algernon"~2	Y	Y	Y	N
"flowers algernon"~11	Y	Y	Y	Y
"algernon flowers"~1	N	N	N	N
"algernon flowers"~2	Y	N	N	N
"algernon flowers"~3	Y	Y	N	N
"algernon flowers"~4	Y	Y	Y	N
"algernon flowers"~13	Y	Y	Y	Y

For the closeness value necessary to match in reverse (right to left) order, count and discard all the extra words, then add twice the total count of remaining words minus one. (In other words, add twice the number of segments). For the full proximity algorithm, see Elasticsearch slop.

Quotes turn off stemming, "but appending" ~ the tilde reactivates the stemming.

	flowers	flower	Flowers for Algernon	flower for Algernon
flowers	Y	Y	Y	Y	22 Stemming is in effect.
"flowers"	Y	N	Y	N	22 Proximity search turns off stemming.
"flowers"~	Y	Y	Y	Y	22 Proximity plus stemming by suffixing a tilde.
"flowers for algernon"	N	N	Y	N	22 Proximity search turns off stemming.
"flowers for algernon"~	N	N	Y	Y	22 Proximity plus stemming by suffixing a tilde.
"flowers algernon"~1	N	N	Y	N	22 Proximity search turns off stemming.
"flowers algernon"~1~	N	N	Y	Y	22 Proximity plus stemming by suffixing a tilde.

Insource

Insource searches can be used to find any one word rendered on a page, but it's made for finding any phrase you might find - including MediaWiki markup, on any page except redirects. This phrase completely ignores greyspace: insource: "state state autocollapse" matches |state={{{state|autocollapse}}}.

insource: word insource: "word1 word2"	Greyspace characters are ignored, just as they are with word searches and exact-phrase searches.
insource:/regexp/ insource:/regexp/i	These are regular expressions. They aren't efficient, so we can only allow a few at a time on the search cluster, but they are very powerful. The version with the extra i runs the expression case-insensitive, and is even less efficient.

Insource complements itself. On the one hand it has full text search for any word in the wikitext, instantly. On the other hand it can process a regexp search for any string of characters. Regex scan all the textual characters in a given list of pages; they don't have a word index to speed things up, and the process is interrupted if it must run more than twenty seconds. Regex run last, so to limit needless character-level scanning, you advance it a list of pages (a search domain) selected by an indexed search added to the query as a "clause", and you do this to every single regex query.. Insource can play both roles, and the best candidate for insource:/arg/ is often insource: arg, where arg is the same.

The syntax for the regexp is insource: no space, and then /regexp/. (No other parameter disallows a space. All the parameters except insource:/regexp/ generously accept space after their colon.)

Insource indexed-search and regexp-search roles are similar in many respects:

• Both search wikitext only.
• Neither finds things "sourced" by a transclusion.
• Neither does stemmed, fuzzy, or proximity searches.
• Both want the fewest results, and both work faster when accompanied by another clause.

But indexed searches all ignore greyspace; wildcards searches do not match greyspace, so regex are the only way to find an exact string of any and all characters, for example a sequence of two spaces. Regex are an entirely different class of search tool that make matching a literal string easy (basic, beginner use), and make matching by metacharacter expressions possible (advanced use) on the wiki. See #Regular expression searches below.

Prefix and namespace

For Search, a namespace term functions to specify the initial search domain. Instead of searching the entire wiki, the default is the main namespace (mainspace).

Only one namespace name can be set from the search box query. It is either the first term or in the last term, in a prefix parameter.

Two or more namespaces may be searched from the Advanced pane of the search bar found on the top of every search results page, Special:Search. Your search domain, as a profile of namespaces, can be set here. The namespaces list will then present itself on the first page of future search results to indicate the search domain of the search results. To unset this, select the default namespace (shown in parentheses), select "Remember", and press Search.

The search bar graphically sets and indicates a search domain. "Content pages" (mainspace), "Multimedia" (File), "Everything" (all plus File), "Translations", etc., are hyperlinks that can activate the query in that domain, and then indicate this by going inactive (dark). But the query will override the search bar. When a namespace or prefix is used in the query the search bar activations and indications may be misleading, so the search bar and the search box are mutually exclusive (not complementary) ways to set the search domain.

A namespace term overrides the search bar, and a prefix term overrides a namespace.

Enter a namespace name, or enter all:, or enter a : colon for mainspace. All does not include the File namespace. File includes media content held at Commons such as PDF, which are all indexed and searchable.

When File is involved, a namespace modifier local: has an effect, otherwise it is ignored.

Namespace aliases are accepted.

talk: "Wind clock"	Find pages in the Talk namespace whose title or text contains the phrase "wind clock".
file: "Wind clock"	Find pages in File namespace, whose title, text, or media content contains the phrase "wind clock".
file: local: "Wind clock"	Filter out results from Commons wiki.
local: "Wind clock"	Ignored. Searches mainspace. Local is ignored unless File is involved.

As with search parameters, local and all must be lowercase. Namespaces names are case insensitive.

The prefix: parameter matches any number of first-characters of all pagenames in one namespace. When the first letters match a namespace name and colon, the search domain changes.

Given a namespace only, prefix will match all its pagenames. Given one character only, it cannot be - dash or ' quote or " double quote. The last character cannot be a colon.

For pagenames that match, their subpage titles match by definition.

The prefix parameter does not allow a space before a namespace, but allows whitespace before a pagename.

prefix:cow	Find pages in mainspace whose title starts with the three letters c o w.
domestic  prefix:cow	Find pages in mainspace whose title starts with the three letters c o w, and that contain the word "domestic".
domestic   prefix:cow/	List any existing subpages of Cow but only if they contain the word "domestic". This is a very common search and is frequently built using a special URL parameter called prefix=.
domestic   prefix:Talk:cow/	List any subpages of Talk:cow, but only if they contain the word "domestic".
1967   prefix:Pink Floyd/	List any subpages of Pink Floyd, but only if it also contains the word "1967".

The prefix parameter goes at the end so that pagename characters may contain " quotation marks.

Exclude content from the search index

Content can be excluded from the search index by adding class="navigation-not-searchable". This will instruct CirrusSearch to ignore this content from the search index (see task T162905 for more context).

Additionally content can be marked as auxiliary information by adding class="searchaux". This will instruct CirrusSearch to move the content from the main text to an auxiliary field which has lower importance for search and snippet highlighting. This distinction is used for items such as image thumbnail descriptions, 'see also' sections, etc.

Filters

A filter will have multiple instances, or negated instances, or it can run as a standalone filtering a search domain. A query is formed as terms that filter a search domain.

Adding another word, phrase, or parameter filters more. A highly refined search result may have very many Y/N filters when every page in the results will be addressed. (In this case ranking is largely irrelevant.) Filtering applies critically to adding a regex term; you want as few pages as possible before adding a regex (because it can never have a prepared index for its search).

A namespace is a specified search domain but not a filter because a namespace will not run standalone. A prefix will negate so it is a filter. The search parameters below are filters for which there may be multiple instances.

Insource (covered above) is also a filter, but insource:/regexp/ is not a filter. Filters and all other search parameters are lowercase. (Namespaces are an exception, being case insensitive.)

Intitle and incategory

Word and phrase searches match in a title and match in the category box on bottom of the page. But with these parameters you can select titles only or category only.

Intitle and incategory are old search parameters.

NOTICE - Everything written in the Regular expression searches is also valid for these searches, including warnings. When possible, please avoid running a bare regexp search. See how this is always possible at Regular expression searches section, below.

intitle

• cow*
  • Find articles whose title or text contains words that start with cow
• intitle:foo
  • Find articles whose title contains foo. Stemming is enabled for foo.
• intitle:"fine line"
  • Find articles whose title contains fine line. Stemming is disabled.
• intitle:foo bar
  • Find articles whose title contains foo and whose title or text contains bar.
• -intitle:foo bar
  • Find articles whose title does not contain foo and whose title or text contains bar.

Regular expression searches are supported for intitle:

intitle:/regex/, intitle:/regex/i

incategory

• incategory:Music
  • Find articles that are in Category:Music
• incategory:"music history"
  • Find articles that are in Category:Music_history
• incategory:"musicals" incategory:"1920"
  • Find articles that are in both Category:Musicals and Category:1920
• -incategory:"musicals" incategory:"1920"
  • Find articles that are not in Category:Musicals but are in Category:1920

Incategory no longer searches any subcategory automatically, but you can now add multiple category pagenames manually.

Linksto

Linksto finds wikilinks to a given name, not links to content. The input is the canonical, case sensitive, page name. It must match the title line of the content page, exactly, before any title modifications of the letter-case. (It must match its {{FULLPAGENAME}}, e.g. Help:CirrusSearch.)

Linksto does not find redirects. It only finds [[wikilinks]], even when they are made by a template. It does not find a link made by a URL, even if that URL is an internal wiki link.

To find all wikilinks to a "Help:Cirrus Search", if "Help:Searching" and "H:S" are redirects to it:

1. linksto: "Help:Cirrus Search"
2. linksto: Help:Searching
3. linksto: H:S

CirrusSearch -linksto: Help:CirrusSearch finds articles that mention "CirrusSearch" but not in a wikilink.

Hastemplate

You can specify template usage with hastemplate: template. Input the canonical pagename to find all usage of the template, but use any of its redirect pagenames finds just that naming. Namespace aliases are accepted, capitalization is entirely ignored, and redirects are found, all in one name-search. (Compare boost-template no default namespace; linksto no namespace aliases, case-sensitive, no redirects; intitle no redirects.)

Hastemplate finds secondary (or meta-template) usage on a page: it searches the post-expansion inclusion. This is the same philosophy as for words and phrases from a template, but here it's for templates from a template. The page will be listed as having that content even though that content is not seen in the wikitext.

• hastemplate: "quality image", finds "Template:Quality image" usage in your default search domain (namespaces).
• hastemplate: portal:contents/tocnavbar, finds mainspace usage of a "Contents/TOCnavbar" template in the Portal namespace.

Contentmodel

The contentmodel: keyword allows to limit the search to pages of a specific content model. For possible models cf. Content handlers . E.g.:

• To see only JSON pages:

contentmodel:json

subpageof

To find sub-pages.

subpageof: ParentPage

For example

• To find all subpages of CirrusSearch.

subpageof:CirrusSearch

• Use double quotes if the parent page contains spaces.

subpageof:"Requests for comment"

Page weighting

Weighting determines snippet, suggestions, and page relevance. The normal weight is one. Additional weighting is given through multipliers.

If the query is just words, pages that match them in order are given a boost. If you add any explicit phrases to your search, or for certain other additions, this "prefer phrase" feature is not applied.

Morelike

morelike:page name 1|page name 2|...|page name n

• Find articles whose text is most similar to the text of the given articles.

morelike:wasp|bee|ant

• Find articles about stinging insects.

morelike:template:search|template:regex|template:usage

• Find templates about regex searching for template usage on the wiki.

morelike is a "greedy" keyword, meaning that it cannot be combined with other search queries. If you want to use other search queries, use morelikethis in your search:

• morelikethis:bee hastemplate:"featured article"
  • Find articles about bees that also have the "featured article" template.

The morelike: query works by choosing a set of words in the input articles and run a query with the chosen words. You can tune the way it works by adding the following parameters to the search results URL:

• cirrusMltMinDocFreq: Minimum number of documents (per shard) that need a term for it to be considered.
• cirrusMltMaxDocFreq: Maximum number of documents (per shard) that have a term for it to be considered.
• cirrusMltMaxQueryTerms: Maximum number of terms to be considered.
• cirrusMltMinTermFreq: Minimum number of times the term appears in the input to doc to be considered. For small fields (title) this value should be 1.
• cirrusMltMinWordLength: Minimal length of a term to be considered. Defaults to 0.
• cirrusMltMaxWordLength: The maximum word length above which words will be ignored. Defaults to unbounded (0).
• cirrusMltFields (comma separated list of values): These are the fields to use. Allowed fields are title, text, auxiliary_text, opening_text, headings and all.
• cirrusMltUseFields (true|false): use only the field data. Defaults to false: the system will extract the content of the text field to build the query.
• cirrusMltPercentTermsToMatch: The percentage of terms to match on. Defaults to 0.3 (30 percent).
• Example: &cirrusMtlUseFields=yes&cirrusMltFields=title&cirrusMltMinTermFreq=1&cirrusMltMinDocFreq=1&cirrusMltMinWordLength=2

These settings can be made persistent by overriding cirrussearch-morelikethis-settings in System message .

Prefer-recent

Adding prefer-recent: anywhere in the query gives recently edited articles a slightly larger than normal boost in the page-ranking rules. Prefer-recent is only applied when using the default relevance sort order.

It defaults to boost only 60% of the score, in a large, 160 day window of time, which can be entered in the query as prefer-recent:0.6,160. This plays well with other page ranking rules, and is intended for most searches.

You can manipulate the rules: prefer-recent:boost,recent Technically "boost" is the proportion of score to scale, and "recent" is the half life in days. The boost is more than the usual multiplier, it is an exponential boost. The factor used in the exponent is the time since the last edit.

For example

prefer-recent:,7

Pages older than 7 days are boosted half as much, and pages older than 14 days are boosted half as much again, and so on. For a simple "sort by date" in highly refined search results, where page ranking and boosting are largely meaningless, just boost the entire score.

• prefer-recent:1,7 (weeks)
• prefer-recent:1,1 (days)
• prefer-recent:1,0.0007 (minutes)
• prefer-recent:1,0.0001 (8.64 seconds)
• prefer-recent:1,0.00001 (seconds)

Boost-templates

You can boost pages' scores based on what templates they contain. This can be done directly in the search via boost-templates:"" or you can set the default for all searches via the MediaWiki:cirrussearch-boost-templates message. boost-templates:"" replaces the contents of cirrussearch-boost-templates if the former is specified. The syntax is a bit funky but was chosen for simplicity. Like prefer-recent, boost-templates is only applied when using the default relevance sort order. Some examples:

File:boost-templates:"Template:Quality Image|200%" incategory:china

Find files in the China category sorting quality images first.

File:boost-templates:"Template:Quality Image|200% Template:Low Quality|50%" incategory:china

Find files in the China category sorting quality images first and low quality images last.

File:boost-templates:"Template:Quality Image|200% Template:Low Quality|50%" popcorn

Find files about popcorn sorting quality images first and low quality images last. Remember that through the use of the cirrussearch-boost-templates message this can be reduced to just popcorn.

Don't try to add decimal points to the percentages. They don't work and search scoring is such that they are unlikely to matter much.

A word of warning about cirrussearch-boost-templates: if you add really really big or small percentages they can poison the full text scoring. Think, for example, if enwiki boosted featured articles by a million percent. Then searches for terms mentioned in featured articles would find the featured articles before exact title matches of the terms. Phrase matching would be similarly blown away so a search like brave new world would find a featured article with those words scattered throughout it instead of the article for Brave New World.

Regular expression searches

A basic indexed-search finds words rendered visible on a page. Hyphenation and punctuation marks and bracketing, slash and other math and computing symbols, are merely boundaries for the words. It is not possible to include them in an indexed search.

These return much much faster when you limit the regexp search-domain to the results of one or more index-based searches.

Warning:

Do not run a bare insource:/regexp/ search. It will probably timeout after 20 seconds anyway, while blocking the queries of responsible users.

An "exact string" regexp search is a basic search; it will simply "quote" the entire regexp, or "backslash-escape" all non-alphanumeric characters in the string. All regexp searches also require that the user develop a simple filter to generate the search domain for the regex engine to search:

• insource:"debian.reproducible.net" insource:/debian\.reproducible\.net/
• insource:"c:\program files (x86)" insource:/C\:\\Program Files \(x86\)/i
• insource:"<tag>{{template}}</tag>" insource:/"<tag>{{template}}<\/tag>"/
• insource:"[[title|link label]]'s" insource:/"[[title|link label]]'s"/
• insource:/regexp/ prefix:{{FULLPAGENAME}}

The last example works from a link on a page, but {{FULLPAGENAME}} doesn't function in the search box.

For example: [[Special:Search/insource:/regex/ prefix:{{FULLPAGENAME}}]] finds the term regex on this page.

A query with no namespace specified and no prefix specified searches your default search domain, (settable on any search-results page, i.e. at Special:Search). Some users keep their default search domain at "all namespaces", i.e. the entire wiki. On a large wiki if this user does a bare regexp search it will probably fail, incurring an HTML timeout, before completing the search.

A regex search actually scours each page in the search domain character-by character. By contrast, an indexed search actually queries a few records from a database separately maintained from the wiki database, and provides nearly instant results. So when using an insource:// (a regexp of any kind), consider creating one the other search terms that will limit the regex search domain as much as possible. There are many search terms that use an index and so instantly provide a more refined search domain for the /regexp/. In order of general effectiveness:

• insource:"" with quotation marks, duplicating the regexp except without the slashes or escape characters, is ideal.
• intitle (without regex search), incategory, and linksto are excellent filters.
• hastemplate: is a very good filter.
• "word1 word2 word3", with or without the quotation marks, are good.
• namespace: is practically useless, but may enable a slow regexp search to complete.

To test a bare regexp query you can create a page with test patterns, and then use the prefix parameter with that fullpagename. The match will be highlighted. It searches that page (in the database) and its subpages.

Search terms that do not increase the efficiency of a regexp search are the page-scoring operators: morelike, boost-template, and prefer-recent.

Metacharacters

This section covers how to escape metacharacters used in regexp searches For the actual meaning of the metacharacters see the explanation of the syntax.

For example:

• to search a namespace, gauge the number of pages with a single term that is a namespace. This will list the number of pages in that namespace.
• starting out to find again what you may have seen, like "wiki-link" or "(trans[in]clusion)" start with namespace and insource filters.

Refining with an exact string

• refinining an ongoing search process with what you want to see, like "2 + 2 = 4", or "site.org" This is ideally the best use of regex, because it adds it as a single regexp term while refining a search, the limited number of pages the regexp must crawl is can be seen.

You can start out intending an exact string search, but keep in mind:

• regex only search the wikitext not the rendered text, so there are some differences around the markup, and even the number of space characters must match precisely.
• You are obligated to supply an accompanying filter.
• You must learn how to escape regex metacharacters.

There are two ways to escape metacharacters. They are both useful at times, and sometimes concatenated side-by-side in the escaping of a string.

• Backslash-escape one of them \char. The insource:/regexp/ uses slashes to delimit the regexp. Giving /reg/exp/ is ambiguous, so you must write /reg\/exp/.
• Put a string of them in double quotes "string". Because escaping a character can't hurt, you can escape any character along with any possible metacharacters in there. Escaping with quotes is cleaner.
• You can't mix methods, but you can concatenate them.

Double-quotes escaping using insource:/"regexp"/ is an easy way to search for many kinds of strings, but you can't backslash-escape anything inside a double-quoted escape.

• /"[[page/name|{{temp-late"/ instead of /\[\[page\/name\|\{\{temp\-late/
• /"literal back\slash"/ is as good as /literal back\/slash/
• But /"This \" fails"/ always.
• And /"This \/ depends"/. It finds the \/ literally, which is not the / you probably wanted.

Backslash-escape using insource:/regexp/ allows escaping the " and / delimiters, but requires taking into account metacharacters, and escaping any:

• To match a / delimiter character use \/.
• To match a " delimiter character use \".
• The escaped metacharacters would be \~\@\#\&\*\(\)\-\+\{\}\[\]\|\<\>\?\.\\.
• The equivalent expression escaped with double-quotes is "~@#&*()-+{}[]|\<>?.\".

The simplest algorithm to create the basic string-finding expression using insource:/"regexp"/, need not take metacharacters into account except for the " and / characters:

1. Write the/str"ing out. (The /" delimiters "/ are not shown.)
2. Replace " with "\"" (previous double-quote: stop, concatenate, quote restart).
3. Replace / with "\/" (stop, concatenate, start).
4. You get insource:/"the"\/"str"\""ing"/, showing concatenation of the two methods.

The square-bracket notation for creating your own character-class also escapes its metacharacters. To target a literal right square bracket in your character-class pattern, it must be backslash escaped, otherwise it can be interpreted as the closing delimiter of the character-class pattern definition. The first position of a character class will also escape the right square bracket. Inside the delimiting square brackets of a character class, the dash character also has special meaning (range) but it too can be included literally in the class the same way as the right square bracket can. For example both of these patterns target a character that is either a dash or a right square bracket or a dot: [-.\]] or [].\-].

For general examples using metacharacters:

• insource:"2+2=4" insource:/"2+2=4"/ matches "2 + 2 = 4", with zero spaces between the characters.
• insource:"2 + 2 = 4" insource:/2 ?\+ ?2 ?= ?4\./ match with zero or one space in between. The equals = sign is not a metacharacter, but the plus + sign is.
• insource:"<tag>[[link|2\3?]]\</tag>" insource:/"<tag>[[link|2\3?]]<"\/"tag>"/

Regex on titles

The insource keyword does only search the page source content. To run regex searches on the title strings intitle:/regex/ can be used.

Advanced example

For example, using metacharacters to find the usage of a template called Val having, inside the template call, an unnamed parameter containing a possibly signed, three to four digit number, possibly surrounded by space characters, and on the same page, inside a template Val call, a named argument fmt=commas having any allowable spaces around it, (it could be the same template call, or a separate one):

hastemplate:val insource:"fmt commas" insource:/\{\{ *[Vv]al *\|[^}]*fmt *= *commas/ insource:/\{\{ *[Vv]al *\|[^}]*[-+]?[0-9]{3,4} *[|}]/

Note that the = sign in "fmt commas" is not needed but that adding it would not change the search results. It is fast because it uses two filters so that every page the regexp crawls has the highest possible potential.

Geo Search

bounded

You can limit search to pages identified as being near some specified geographic coordinates. The coordinates can either be specified as a <lat>,<lon> pair, or by providing a page title from which to source the coordinates. A distance to limit the search to can be prepended if desired. Examples:

• neartitle:"San Francisco"
• neartitle:"100km,San Francisco"
• nearcoord:37.77666667,-122.39
• nearcoord:42km,37.77666667,-122.39

boosted

You can alternatively increase the score of pages within a specified geographic area. The syntax is the same as bounded search, but with boost- prepended to the keyword. This effectively doubles the score for pages within the search range, giving a better chance for nearby search results to be near the top.

• boost-neartitle:"San Francisco"
• boost-neartitle:"100km,San Francisco"
• boost-nearcoord:37.77666667,-122.39
• boost-nearcoord:42km,37.77666667,-122.39

File properties search

CirrusSearch supports indexing and searching of properties of files in the File: namespace. This includes:

• file media type
• MIME type
• size
• width & height
• resolution
• bit depth for files that support these

While these predicates are useful only for files, they by themselves do not limit search to File: namespace. It is recommended to include this namespace in a search or restrict the search to only this namespace when using these conditionals.

filetype

Searching for file type allows to retrieve files according to their classification, such as office documents, videos, raster images, vector images, etc. The following types currently exist:

• UNKNOWN
• BITMAP
• DRAWING
• AUDIO
• VIDEO
• MULTIMEDIA
• OFFICE
• TEXT
• EXECUTABLE
• ARCHIVE

This list may be extended in the future. See also MEDIATYPE_* constants in Defines.php.

The syntax of the search is: filetype:{type}. Example:

filetype:video - looks for all videos

The filetype search is not case-sensitive.

filemime

Matches file MIME type. The syntax is:

filemime:{MIMEtype} - look for files of this MIME type

The argument can be quoted to specify exact match. Without quotes, partial matches to components of MIME type will be accepted too.

Examples:

filemime:"image/png" - look for files with MIME type exactly image/png

filemime:pdf - look for all PDF documents

The MIME type search is not case sensitive.

filesize

Search for file of given size, in kilobytes (kilobyte means 1024 bytes). The syntax is:

filesize:{number} or filesize:>{number} - file with size at least given number

filesize:<{number} - file with size no more than given number

filesize:{number},{number} - file with size between given numbers

Examples:

filesize:>20 or filesize:20 - files 20KB and bigger

filesize:<1024 - files smaller than 1MB

filesize:100,500 - files with sizes between 100KB and 500KB

File measures

It is possible to search for specific file measures: width, height, resolution (which is defined as square root of height × width), and bit depth. Not all files may have these properties. The syntax is:

{measure}:{number} - file with measure that equals to given number

{measure}:>{number} - file with measure that is at least given number

{measure}:<{number} - file with measure that is no more than given number

{measure}:{number},{number} - file with measure that is between given numbers

Where measure can be:

filew or filewidth - file width

fileh or fileheight - file height

fileres - file resolution (see above)

filebits - file bit depth

Examples:

filew:>800 fileh:>600 - files that are at least 800x600 pixels in size

filebits:16 - files with 16-bit color depth

fileheight:100,500 - file between 100 and 500 pixels high

Explicit sort orders

In addition to the default relevance based sort CirrusSearch can provide results a few other explicit sort orders. Specifying a sorting order other than relevance will disable all search keywords that affect scoring, such as prefer-recent or boost-templates. The keywords will still be parsed, but they will have no effect.

Sorting options are currently available from the MediaWiki API by providing the srsort parameter.

Sorting options can be manually added to a search URL by adding &sort=order, for example https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?search=foo&sort=last_edit_desc.

Valid sort orders include:

Sort order	Description
incoming_links_asc	Lowest to highest number of incoming links. This is approximately from least to most popular.
incoming_links_desc	Highest to lowest number of incoming links. This is approximately from most to least popular.
last_edit_asc	From least recently to most recently edited
last_edit_desc	From most to least recently edited
create_timestamp_asc	From least to most recently created
create_timestamp_desc	From most to least recently created
just_match	A simple relevance sort based only on text matching
relevance	A relevance sort taking into account many features of the document
random	Randomized
none	Unsorted, arbitrarily ordered lists. Preferred for large result sets.

CirrusSearch

Main page: Help:CirrusSearch

CirrusSearch  replaced is the old LuceneSearch engine in April 2020. The new search engine features three main improvements over the old search engine, namely:

1. Better support for searching in different languages.
2. Faster updates to the search index, meaning changes to articles are reflected in search results much faster.
3. Expanding templates, meaning that all content in an article that's in a template is now reflected in search results.

For more details:

• Help:Searching
• The anatomy of search - blog series on search
• Wikimania 2014 - CirrusSearch
• CirrusSearch: How we've replaced a great search engine with an awesome search engine
  • Author of the submission - Chad Horohoe , Nik Everett , Dan Garry 

For information on the MediaWiki extension see Extension:CirrusSearch . If your question is not answered here, feel free to ask on Saintapedia's Talk page, use the Feedback tool, or ask it on Wikipedia's talk page.

LuceneSearch

Extension:MWSearch  was replaced in April 2020.

Saintapedia interface

File:Help-Saintapedia Overview-Sections.png

Saintapedia as viewed by someone who has created an account and is signed into the system. A - Saintapedia's left navigation B - Page tabs - Page table (with Namespace) and Discussion page/Talk page C - Help:Edit and history bar D - Help:Account bar E - Help:Search

See also

• Help:Searching
• Help:AdvancedSearch

External links

• Extension:CirrusSearch 
• Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester  (Completion Suggester) - the incremental search feature of CirrusSearch
• Wikimedia Discovery/Search/Glossary  (Wikimedia Discovery/Search/Glossary) - definitions, context, and links for terms related to search.
• Search/Old  (See Search/Old#Timeline) for more on the development and debut of of CirrusSearch.
• See Help:Searching  for MWSearch, used by the many wikis that don't have a search extension.
• From Lucene, highly relevant documentation.
• Full specifications in the extension's browser tests (as of 2017-12-06)
• Extension:CirrusSearch/Profiles  – sets of tunable parameters that influence various aspect of the indexing
• Wikimedia blog articles related to search
• Wikimedia moving to Elasticsearch

References