QESTonline:Searching - Revision history

Michael.howland: /* Avoid short and common words */

2006-01-10T23:30:45Z

Avoid short and common words

←Older revision		Revision as of 23:30, 10 January 2006
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	A lot of this information is taken from the MediaWiki User's guide, to check out the full thing go to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User's_Guide MediaWiki User's Guide]		A lot of this information is taken from the MediaWiki User's guide, to check out the full thing go to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User's_Guide MediaWiki User's Guide]

	== Avoid ~~short and~~ common words ==		== Avoid common words ==

	This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. ~~Short numbers, and words~~ that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.		This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Words that appear in half of all pages will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.

	~~A lot of~~ common words are disallowed as search terms~~, for~~ a full list see [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Common_words%2C_searching_for_which_is_not_possible Common Words not Searched For].		Many common words are disallowed as search terms. For a full list see [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Common_words%2C_searching_for_which_is_not_possible Common Words not Searched For].

	~~Words of 3 letters or less by themselves will also not yield any results (no luck searching on "SQL" then)~~.

	== Words with special characters ==		== Words with special characters ==

Krzysztof at 01:12, 22 December 2005

2005-12-22T01:12:44Z

←Older revision		Revision as of 01:12, 22 December 2005
Line 1:		Line 1:
	A lot of this information is taken from the MediaWiki User's guide, to check out the full thing go to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User's_Guide]		A lot of this information is taken from the MediaWiki User's guide, to check out the full thing go to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User's_Guide MediaWiki User's Guide]

	== Avoid short and common words ==		== Avoid short and common words ==
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	This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.		This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.

	A lot of common words are disallowed as search terms, for a full list see [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Common_words%2C_searching_for_which_is_not_possible].		A lot of common words are disallowed as search terms, for a full list see [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Common_words%2C_searching_for_which_is_not_possible Common Words not Searched For].

	Words of 3 letters or less by themselves will also not yield any results (no luck searching on "SQL" then).		Words of 3 letters or less by themselves will also not yield any results (no luck searching on "SQL" then).

Krzysztof at 01:11, 22 December 2005

2005-12-22T01:11:58Z

New page

A lot of this information is taken from the MediaWiki User's guide, to check out the full thing go to [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User's_Guide]

== Avoid short and common words ==

This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.

A lot of common words are disallowed as search terms, for a full list see [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Common_words%2C_searching_for_which_is_not_possible].

Words of 3 letters or less by themselves will also not yield any results (no luck searching on "SQL" then).

== Words with special characters ==

In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed -- the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent.

== Phrase ==

There is no method for searching for a phrase. Contrary to what you might expect, enclosing phrases in double quotation marks such as "can of tuna" will retrieve all pages containing "of" "tuna" and "can".

== No regular expressions or wildcards ==

This is somewhat dissapointing but you cannot use regular expressions or wildcards such as ? or *. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it. To search for pages with the words "boat" or "boats" search like this: "boat or boats".