Editing Incubator escapee wiki:External search engines (section)

{{for|general information on searching Wikipedia|Help:Searching}}
Besides [[Help:Searching|Wikipedia internal search engine]], there are various [[search engine]]s that can provide domain-specific searches, which let you search Wikipedia specifically. Searches are based on the text as shown by the browser, so wiki markup is irrelevant. Depending on your browser, you may also be able to use [[Wikipedia:tools|tools]] that allow you to search Wikipedia using [[bookmarklet]]s.

In general, external search engines are faster than a Wikipedia search. However, because the search engine's cache is based on when the site was indexed, the search may not return newly created pages. Similarly, the search engine's cached version of the page will not be as up-to-date as the link to Wikipedia itself. Also, when returning Wikipedia articles in a regular search, [[Wikipedia:mirrors and forks|mirrors and forks]] of Wikipedia content frequently rank higher than the actual Wikipedia articles because of [[search engine optimization]] techniques.

These issues may be less of a problem when using certain search engines that process Wikipedia differently:

* [[#Google|Google]] tends to include Wikipedia as part of its normal search, and it comes up fairly accurately.
* Yahoo! includes Wikipedia as part of its content acquisition program and gets a regular [[datafeed]].