Editing Help:Searching (section)

== Tips and tricks ==

=== Searching within a page ===
The internal search engine cannot locate occurrences of a string within the page you are viewing but browsers can usually do this with {{keypress|Ctrl|F}}, or {{keypress|Command|F}} on a Mac.

=== Searching for a specific person's contributions ===
Due to the way the wikimedia database is indexed, there's no direct way to search for something like {{kbd|insource:foo author:person}}.   But, you can come close in some situations.  If you're looking for something on a talk (or, sometimes, project) page, people tend to leave a signature after each edit, and such pages are usually set up so old edits roll off onto archive pages.  In this case, the [[:mw:Help:CirrusSearch#Words,_phrases,_and_modifiers|proximity search]] operator can find instances of your search term near the user's name.  Something like {{kbd|foo person ~50}} might find what you are looking for.

=== Search Wikipedia from any web page ===
To get Wikipedia search results while on any ''[[web page]]'', you can temporarily set your web browser's search box to become a Wikipedia search search box, even though you're on another web site {{crossref|pw=y|(see [[Help:Searching from a web browser]])}}. This trick removes the need to first navigate to Wikipedia from a web page, and {{em|then}} do the search or navigation. It is a temporary change, and then you put it back to your preferred web-search engine.

You can just drag items on the page the name up to the web browser search box {{em|while on any web site}}, even in the lower sections of a Wikipedia page, where no search box is immediately available.

You can reach all twelve [[WP:SISTER|sister projects]] the same way by using interwiki prefixes in the web browser's search box. For example, you can go straight to a [[Wiktionary]] entry by using the prefix <code>wikt:</code> from your web-search box.<!--
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=== SQL searches / Quarry ===
The entire wikipedia database (with some redactions for privacy) is exposed for SQL queries at the experimental [[quarry:|Quarry service]].  Using this requires a high degree of technical skill; you must not only know SQL, but also be able to navigate the complex (and not always well documented) database schema.  For those who are so equipped, it may provide another option for searches which would be impossible to do via the standard search interface.<!--
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