Help:Searching

From WikiSpooks

There are two separate and distinct search engine implementations on Wikispooks:

1. A Custom Google search which searches the entire Wikispooks sites, including Wikispooks hosted mirrors, the WikiSpooks blog and the Wikispooks collection of bit-torrent files.
2. The built-in Wiki search engine which searches the WikiSpooks wiki only.

Contents 1 Google Custom Search 2 Built-in Wiki Search Engine 2.1 How it works 2.2 Restricting the search

Google Custom Search

Note and Disclaimer: Any advertisments that appear in the results page of this search facility are beyong the control of WikiSpooks. Acceptance of such adverts is a condition that Google imposes for the otherwise free use of the facility.

Entering a search term in the above box initiates a search of ALL of the following:

• WikiSpooks wiki (ie the wiki you are reading now)
• WikiSpooks blog
• WikiSpooks hosted mirrors:
  • ISGP Archive
  • Wikileaks Mirror
• WikiSpooks bit-torrent files collection

Built-in Wiki Search Engine

This is the quickest way to find information in the WikiSpooks Wiki. This search box appears on the top-right side of your screen whilst on any page.

Put your keyword in the search box.

• Pressing Enter on keyboard or clicking the magnifying glass icon will take you automatically to the article, if it exists.
• Clicking the box that appears below the input box will search the text of all pages on the wiki (with some restrictions, see below).

If you pressed enter or you clicked magnifying glass icon and the page you were looking for did not exist, you will be presented with a list of articles that matched your search criteria (or a message that no matches were found).

How it works

This is how the search works:

• Only the article content is searched - the page title is ignored.
• The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click initiate the search, 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 "MediaWiki", "mediawiki" and "MEDIAWIKI" all give the same result.

Restricting the search

If you click the magnifying glass icon 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. Tick 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.