Editing Help:Searching (section)

== If you cannot find what you are looking for ==
If you're looking for a place where wine comes from pronounced "Bordo", you can try searching for a more general article such as "Wine", "Wine regions" (returning "List of wine-producing regions") or other wine types such as "Burgundy" and see if it's mentioned there or follow links (in this case, to "Burgundy wine", which has several mentions of "Bordeaux", and links to "French wine" and "Bordeaux wine"). If you know it's in France, look at "France" or the [[:Category:Cities in France]], from where you can easily find Bordeaux. You can try various things depending upon the particular case; for "Bordo" wine, it's quite likely that the first letters are "bord", so search an article you've landed on for these letters. If you [[Wikipedia:Search engine test|use Google to search Wikipedia]], and click on "cache" at the bottom of any result in the search engine results page, you'll see the word(s) that you searched for highlighted in context.

{{crossref|pw=y|(For an overview of how to find and navigate Wikipedia content, see [[Wikipedia:Contents]]. If you're looking for a straight definition of a word, try our sister project [[:en:wiktionary|Wiktionary]].)}}

If there is no appropriate page on Wikipedia, consider [[Wikipedia:How to start a page|creating a page]], since [[Wikipedia:Introduction|you can edit]] Wikipedia right now. Or consider adding what you were looking for to the [[Wikipedia:Requested articles|Requested articles]] page.

If you have a question, then see [[Wikipedia:Questions|Where to ask questions]], which is a list of departments where our volunteers answer questions, any question you can possibly imagine.

A common mistake is to type a natural-language question into the search box and expect an answer. While some Web search tools support this, the Wikipedia search is a text search only; questions, as such, can be asked at the [[WP:REFDESK|reference desk]] and similar places. A search for {{kbd|how do clocks work?}} will return articles with the words {{samp|how}}, {{samp|do}}, {{samp|clocks}}, and {{samp|work}}, ignoring the question mark (in practice this can lead to articles answering simple questions).

===Delay in updating the search index===
{{anchor|Delay}}
Because people like to see their work in search results, the search engine attempts to update in [[Real-time computing#Near real-time|near real-time]]. Edits made to pages via templates can take a little longer to propagate. If you see the index lagging more than a day or so, [[wmfblog:2013/03/18/how-to-create-a-good-first-bug-report/|report it]]. For other technical issues with the search engine, please leave a message on [[Wikipedia talk:Searching|the talk page]].