Help:Searching

Searching WikiDoc

 * 1) In order to search for a particular article with a given word in it, simply type the word or topic you are looking for into the search box on the left hand side of the screen and press the Search button.
 * 2) You will also notice there is also a Go button next to the Search button. The Go button only displays pages with the title that you type in. Using GO is a much more restricted search listing only pages with that name! On the other hand, if you know the exact name of the page you want, the GO button allows you to go directly to the page without following links.
 * 3) Another way to search is through categories. You can click on a category such as Pulmonary or Nephrology on the Main Home Page and you will see a list of all articles that are filed underneath that particular category. To see a list all all of the categories click Special:categories

How Can I See A List of All the Pages in WikiDoc?
Either:
 * 1) Click here at Special:Allpages - for an alphabetic index for all pages
 * 2) You can also type Special:Allpages in the search menu.
 * 3) Click on the button Table of Contents above and to the left.

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.

See Help:Common words, searching for which is not possible for the stop words filtered out by the database. From there one can at least go to a page with a stop word as title. Searching for the combination of one or more words and the common word "not" give a database query syntax error due to a bug in the software.

Search is case-insensitive
The searches for "acute MI", "Acute MI" and "ACUTE MI" all return the same results.

Don't Use Phrases!
WikiDoc has no method for searching for a phrase. Enclosing phrases in double quotation marks such as "can of tuna" will retrieve all pages containing "of" "tuna" and "can".

Don't Use Regular Expressions or Wildcards!
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".

Don't Search for Words in Single Quotes
If a word appears in a page with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in pages, for which this problem does not arise.

An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.

Don't use the Underline Character _ as a Space
Note that the underscore (_) is not equivalent to a space: putting it in the URL results in a search for a word containing actual underscores at those positions.

Be Patient! There is a Delay in Updating the Search Index
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes to pages are not always immediately taken into account in searches.

How do I Browse Through Filenames of the Images?
Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image pages. For searching the titles, use Special:Imagelist.

The wikitext is searched
The wikitext (source text, what one sees in the edit box) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for interlanguage links, special characters (if ê is coded as &amp;ecirc; it is found searching for ecirc), etc.

Highlighting
Some portions of matching pages that contain the searched-for terms are shown, with the terms highlighted in red. You can set the number of lines extracted and the amount of text per line shown in your preferences.

If you search e.g. for "book" you get only pages with that word, not pages with "books" only. However, on pages with "book" and "books", also the part "book" of the word "books" is highlighted.