User:Iluvhistory66/Sandbox/Wiki Search Help

Wiki Help Browsing the Wiki  Searching

Overview
This page shows how to search the wiki. The FamilySearch Research Wiki houses pages with multiple subjects to be accessed. It may be confusing to know how and/or where to start searching and/or what are the best words/key phrases to use in the search box. This page helps answer those questions to provide a positive experience for everyone searching for their kindred dead.

Search Box
A search box is found on every page. The search box will navigate directly to a given page name upon an exact match. But, you can force it to show you other pages that include your search string by including a tilde character ~ anywhere in the query. The maximum search string is 300 characters long

Step-by-step Search Instructions
Remember:


 * Results with keywords in the Article Titles will always be listed first.
 * Results with keywords in the body of the article will be listed next.
 * The search looks for the words in the title first
 * Next, article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click “”, 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 "FamilySearch", "familysearch" and "FAMILYSEARCH" all give the same result.

Restricting the search
On the search results page, you'll see "Advanced Search" on the left. This searches "namespaces," a broad category of types of articles that are in the Research Wiki. The "Main" namespace includes all research help articles. The User namespace includes information about the people who contribute to the wiki. See more information about namespaces.

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.