Help talk:Browsing
Using quotes to find what I really want
If I'm looking for info about chromium-bsu (a game), and I enter 'chromium-bsu' (w/o the quotes) in the search box, I get info mostly about the chromium browser. Searching for "chromium-bsu" (with the quotes) solves this problem.
This may be non obvious and may even be a bug. Can anyone shed some light on this issue? -- Karol 13:45, 25 January 2012 (EST)
- Yeah I noticed that some time ago, but never investigated it. Now that you've given me an input I can see that this could actually be a (known? didn't search for it) bug: searching for a string with a dash in the middle (without quotes) gives the same results as searching only for the part of the string before the dash, but without previewing the matching content (the dash and the second part of the string are ignored).
- In short, compare the results for [1] and [2].
- I guess mentioning the quoting method in this article can be useful. A bug report to MediaWiki may be even more :P (after some further testing)
- -- Kynikos 05:56, 27 January 2012 (EST)
- This might be a feature rather than a bug. See Wikipedia Search Syntax. Search chromium bsu without quotes or dash. The "-" is interpreted as the exclusion operator. -- pointone 13:50, 27 January 2012 (EST)
- When searching Arch wiki for chromium-bsu I get matches for both chromium and chromium-bsu, so it doesn't exclude the 'bsu' part, but unnecessarily clutters the search results. -- Karol 14:43, 27 January 2012 (EST)
- There's also the possibility that it's a bug in the feature, here are some tests:
chromium[3]: used for comparisonchromium-bsu[4]: this gives exactly the same results as 1, but without the content previews, except for the matches that really containchromium-bsu"chromium-bsu"[5]: this seems to return all the articles that contain "chromium-bsu" except for Games (Dansk), even though it indeed contains "chromium-bsu"chromium -bsu[6]: this seems to actually exclude the pages that contain "chromium" but also "bsu", but somehow it includes Games (Dansk), which indeed contains "bsu"
- -- Kynikos 09:30, 28 January 2012 (EST)
- There's also the possibility that it's a bug in the feature, here are some tests:
- When searching Arch wiki for chromium-bsu I get matches for both chromium and chromium-bsu, so it doesn't exclude the 'bsu' part, but unnecessarily clutters the search results. -- Karol 14:43, 27 January 2012 (EST)
- This might be a feature rather than a bug. See Wikipedia Search Syntax. Search chromium bsu without quotes or dash. The "-" is interpreted as the exclusion operator. -- pointone 13:50, 27 January 2012 (EST)
Expansion
Collecting references for the internal search engine:
We may also describe categories and Table of contents as a way to search for similar information on a given subject.
-- Lahwaacz (talk) 17:38, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
- These 2 forum threads contain more possibly interesting links and info: [7], [8]. -- Kynikos (talk) 15:19, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Search only for articles in English
Is there a way to restrict search results to articles written in English? There is a proposal that could make this easy - Help_talk:I18n#Language_namespace(s)_in_place_of_suffixes?, but it seems it did not go anywhere ...
EDIT: the two BBS threads linked above suggest that this is not possible currently, but I feel this should be easier than transitioning to language namespaces, maybe tags or categories could be used for searching somehow? Neven (talk) 02:21, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
- I agree that this should be possible, unfortunately it's not. Special:Search only supports filtering by namespace. Any solution will probably require additional extensions. --Larivact (talk) 05:38, 5 January 2019 (UTC)