Help:CirrusSearch - MediaWiki

Help:CirrusSearch - MediaWiki
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Note:
When you edit this page, you agree to release your contribution under the
CC0
. See
Public Domain Help Pages
for more info.
The quickest way to find information in Wikimedia projects is to look it up directly.
On every page there is a
box.
CirrusSearch
is a MediaWiki extension that uses
OpenSearch
to provide enhanced search features over the
default MediaWiki search
The Wikimedia Foundation uses CirrusSearch for all
Wikimedia projects
This page describes the features of CirrusSearch.
If your question is not answered here, feel free to ask on the
talk page
and someone will answer it for you.
For information on the MediaWiki extension, see
Extension:CirrusSearch
For its use on Wikidata, see
Help:Extension:WikibaseCirrusSearch
For information about debugging, see
Help:CirrusSearch/Debug
How it works
Enter keywords and phrases and press
↵ Enter
on your keyboard or click the magnifying glass icon,
, or on older skins like
Skin:MonoBook
the "Go" button.
If a page has the same title as what you entered, you will be directed to that page.
Otherwise, it searches all pages on the wiki, and presents a list of articles that matched your search terms, or a message informing you that no page has all the key words and phrases.
If you click the
button 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.
Check the namespaces you require for this search.
All keywords mentioned below are case-sensitive and in lowercase.
What's improved?
CirrusSearch features three main improvements over the default MediaWiki search, namely:
Better support for searching in different languages.
Faster updates to the search index, meaning changes to articles are reflected in search results much faster.
Expanding templates, meaning that all content from a template is now reflected in search results.
How frequently is the search index updated?
There are two primary search indexes to consider:
The first is full-text search, on Special:Search.
This index is updated in near real time.
Changes to pages should appear within a few minutes in the search results, but 30 minutes is still considered normal operation.
Changes to templates should take effect in articles that include the template in a few minutes, taking up to several hours depending on the number of pages using the template.
null edit
to the article will force the change through, but that shouldn't be required if everything is going well.
The second index to consider is the fuzzy auto-complete title search.
This index is updated once a day and mirrors what was found in the full-text search index at the time the index was updated.
Depending on timing a new page could take two days to be found in the fuzzy title autocomplete.
If this is unacceptable for a particular use case, within
user search options
the title completion can be changed to classic prefix search, which uses the full-text search index.
Search suggestions
The search suggestions you get when you type into the search box that drops down candidate pages is sorted by a rough measure of article quality.
This takes into account the number of incoming wikilinks, the size of the page, the number of external links, the number of headings, and the number of redirects.
Search suggestions can be skipped and queries will go directly to the search results page.
Add a tilde
before the query.
Example "~Frida Kahlo".
The search suggestions will still appear, but hitting the Enter key at any time will take you to the search results page.
Accent/diacritic folding is turned on for some languages; the details are language-specific.
The algorithm used to rank suggestions is described in more detail at
Extension:CirrusSearch/CompletionSuggester
Full text search
A "full text search" is an "indexed search".
All pages are stored in the wiki database, and all the words in the non-redirect pages are stored in the search database, which is an index to practically the full text of the wiki.
Each visible word is indexed to the list of pages where it is found, so a search for a word is as fast as looking up a single-record.
Furthermore, for any changes in wording, the search index is updated within seconds.
There are many indexes of the "full text" of the wiki to facilitate the many types of searches needed.
The full wikitext is indexed many times into many special-purpose indexes, each parsing the wikitext in whatever way optimizes their use.
Example indexes include:
"auxiliary" text, includes hatnotes, captions, ToC, and any wikitext classed by an HTML attribute
class=searchaux
"Lead-in" text is the wikitext between the top of the page and the first heading.
The "category" text indexes the listings at the bottom.
Templates are indexed. If the transcluded words of a template change, then all the pages that transclude it are updated. (This can take a long time depending on a job queue.) If the subtemplates used by a template change, the index is updated.
Document contents that are stored in the File/Media namespace are now indexed. Thousands of formats are recognized.
There is support for dozens of languages, but all languages are wanted.
There is a list of currently supported languages at
elasticsearch.org
; see their
documentation on contributing
to submit requests or patches.
Third-party open-source libraries are also used to support additional languages not covered by Elasticsearch.
CirrusSearch will optimize your query, and run it. The resulting titles are weighted by relevance, and heavily post-processed, 20 at a time, for the search results page. For example snippets are garnered from the article, and search terms are highlighted in bold text.
Search results will often be accompanied by various preliminary reports. These include
Did you mean
(spelling correction), and, when no results would otherwise be found it will say
Showing results for
(query correction) and
search instead for
(your query).
Search features also include:
Sorting navigation suggestions by the number of incoming links.
Starting with the tilde character
to disable navigation and suggestions in such a way that also preserves page ranking.
Smart-matching characters by normalizing (or "folding") non-keyboard characters into keyboard characters.
Words and phrases that match are highlighted in bold on the search results page. The highlighter is a cosmetic analyzer, while the search-indexing analyzer actually finds the page, and these may not be 100% in sync, especially for regex. The highlighter can match more or less accurately than the indexer.
Words, phrases, and modifiers
The basic search term is a word or a "phrase in quotes".
Details vary by language, especially for languages without spaces, but search typically recognizes a "word" to be:
a string of digits
a string of letters
subwords between letters/digit transitions, such as in
txt2regex
subwords inside a compoundName using
camelCase
A "stop word" is a word that is ignored (because it is common, or for other reasons).
The list of stop words is language-specific and not all languages support stop words.
A given search term matches against
content
(rendered on the page). To match against wikitext instead, use the
insource
search parameter (See
section
below). Each search parameter has its own index, and interprets its given term in its own way.
Spacing between words, phrases, parameters, and input to parameters, can include generous instances of whitespace and
greyspace characters
"Greyspace characters" are all the non-alphanumeric characters
~!@#$%^&()_+-={}|[]\:";'<>?,./
A mixed string of
greyspace characters
and whitespace characters, is "greyspace", and is treated as one big word boundary.
Greyspace is how indexes are made and queries are interpreted.
Two exceptions are where 1) an
embedded:colon
is one word (it being treated as a letter), and 2) an embedded comma
such as in
1,2,3
, is treated as a number.
Greyspace characters are otherwise ignored unless, due to query syntax, they can be interpreted as modifier characters.
The modifiers are
~ * \? - " !
Depending on their placement in the syntax they can apply to a term, a parameter, or to an entire query.
Word and phrase modifiers are the wildcard, proximity, and fuzzy searches.
Each parameter can have their own modifiers, but in general:
A fuzzy-word or fuzzy-phrase search can suffix a tilde
character (and a number telling the degree).
A tilde
character prefixed to the first term of a query guarantees search results instead of any possible navigation.
A wildcard character inside a word can be an (escaped) question mark \? for one character or an asterisk
character for zero or more characters.
Truth-logic can interpret
AND
and
OR
, but parameters cannot. Note that the
AND
and
OR
operators currently
do not function in the traditional truth-logic manner!
For details see more on
logical operators
Truth-logic understands
or
prefixed to a term to invert the usual meaning of the term from "match" to "exclude".
Words that begin with
or
, such as
-in-law
or
!Kung
can exactly match titles and redirects, but will also match every document that does
not
contain the negated word, which is usually almost all documents. To search for such terms other than as exact matches for titles or redirects, use the
insource
search parameter (See
section
below).
Quotes around words mark an "exact phrase" search. For parameters they are also needed to delimit multi-word input.
Stemming is automatic but can be turned off using an "exact phrase".
The two wildcard characters are the star and the (escaped) question mark, and both can come in the middle or end of a word. The escaped question mark
\?
stands for one character and the star
stands for any number of characters. Because many users, instead of writing a query, will ask a question, any question mark is ignored unless purposefully escaped
\?
into its wildcard meaning.
A phrase search can be initiated by various hints to the search engine.
Each method of hinting has a side-effect of how tolerant the matching of the word sequence will be.
For
greyspace
camelCase
, or
txt2number
hints:
given
words-joined_by_greyspace(characters)
or
wordsJoinedByCamelCaseCharacters
it finds
words joined by
...
characters
, in their bare forms or greyspace forms.
txt2number
will match
txt 2 number
or
txt-2.number
Stop words are enabled for the edge cases (in the periphery) of a grey_space or camelCase phrase. An example using
the
of
, and
is that
the_invisible_hand_of_a
matches
invisible hand
within the text
meetings invisible hand shake
A "search instead" report is triggered when a universally unknown word is ignored in a phrase.
Each one of the following types of phrase-matching contains and widens the match-tolerances of the previous one:
An "exact phrase" "in quotes" will tolerate (match with) greyspace. Given
"exact_phrase"
or
"exact phrase"
it matches
"exact]phrase"
A greyspace_phrase initiates stemming and
stop word
checks.
Given
CamelCase
it will
additionally
match
camelcase
, in all lowercase, because CirrusSearch is not case sensitive in matching. Note that
CamelCase
matching is not enabled for all languages.
Some parameters interpret greyspace phrases, but other parameters, like
insource
only interpret the usual "phrase in quotes".
In search terminology, support for "stemming" means that a search for "swim" will also include "swimming" and "swimmed", but may not include irregular forms like "swam".
Search phrase
parserfunction
parserFunction
parser function
parser-function
parser:function
parSer:funcTion
parserfunction
"parser function"
parser_function
parserFunction
"parser:function"
"parser_function"
"parSer_funcTion"
parSer_FuncTion
Note that all stemming is case insensitive.
Note how the "exact phrase" search interpreted the
embedded:colon
character as a letter, but not the
embedded_underscore
character. A similar event occurs with the comma
character inside a number.
Given
in:this:word
, CirrusSearch, when in an "exact phrase" context (which includes the
insource
parameter context), will not match
in
this
, or
word
, but will then only match
in:this:word
Otherwise, remember that for CirrusSearch
words are letters, numbers, or a combination of the two, and case does not matter
The common word search employs the space character and is aggressive with stemming, and when the same words are joined by greyspace characters or camelCase they are aggressive with phrases and subwords.
When common words like "of" or "the" are included in a greyspace-phrase, they are ignored, so as to match more aggressively.
A greyspace_phrase search term, or a camelCase, or a txt2number term, match the signified words interchangeably.
You can use any of those three forms.
Now
camelcase
matches
camelCase
because Search is not case sensitive, but
camelCase
matches
camelcase
because camelCase is more aggressive.
Like the rest of Search, subword "words" are not case-sensitive. By comparison the "exact phrase" is greyspace oriented and ignores numeric or letter-case transitions, and stemming. "Quoted phrases" are not case sensitive.
From the table we can surmise that the basic search
parser_function -"parser function"
is the sum of the basic searches
parserFunction
and
parser function
Making inquiries with numbers, we would find that:
Plan9
or
Plan_9
matches any of:
plan9
plans 9
planned 9th
(planned) 9.2
"plans" (9:24)
"plan9"
only matches
plan9
(case insensitive)
Plan*9
matches
plan9
or
planet4589
The star
wildcard matches a string of letters and digits within a rendered word,
but never the beginning character
One or more characters must precede the
character.
When
matches numbers, a comma is considered part of one number, but the decimal point is considered a greyspace character, and will delimit two numbers.
Inside an "exact phrase"
is treated as a greyspace character and not a wild card character, so it delimits words.
The
\?
wildcard represents one letter or number;
*\?
is also accepted, but
\?*
is not recognized.
The wildcards are for basic word, phrase, and insource searches, and may also be an alternative to (some) advanced regex searches (covered later).
Putting a tilde
character after a word or phrase activates a fuzzy search.
For a phrase it is termed a
proximity
search, because
proximal
words are tolerated to an approximate rather than
exact phrase
For example,
"exact one two phrase"~2
matches
exact phrase
For a word it means extra characters or
changed
characters.
For a phrase a fuzzy search
requires
a whole number telling it how many extra words to fit in, but for a word a fuzzy search can have a decimal fraction,
defaulting
to
word~0.5
word~.5
), where at most two letters can be found swapped, changed, or added, but never the first two letters.
For a proximity phrase, a large number can be used, but that is an "expensive" (slow) search.
For a word
word~2
is most fuzzy with an edit distance of 2 (default), and
word~1
is least fuzzy, and
word~0
is not fuzzy at all.
flowers algernon
Flowers for Algernon
flowers are for Algernon
Flowers a1 2b 3c 4f 5j 6l 7j 8p q9 z10 for Algernon
"flowers algernon"
"flowers algernon"~0
"flowers algernon"~1
"flowers algernon"~2
"flowers algernon"~11
"algernon flowers"~1
"algernon flowers"~2
"algernon flowers"~3
"algernon flowers"~4
"algernon flowers"~13
For the closeness value necessary to match in reverse (right to left) order, count and discard all the extra words, then add twice the total count of remaining words minus one.
(In other words, add twice the number of segments).
For the full proximity algorithm, see
Elasticsearch slop
Quotes turn off stemming,
"but appending"~
the tilde reactivates the stemming.
flowers
flower
Flowers for Algernon
flower for Algernon
flowers
Stemming is in effect.
"flowers"
Proximity search turns off stemming.
"flowers"~
Proximity plus stemming by suffixing a tilde.
"flowers for algernon"
Proximity search turns off stemming.
"flowers for algernon"~
Proximity plus stemming by suffixing a tilde.
"flowers algernon"~1
Proximity search turns off stemming.
"flowers algernon"~1~
Proximity plus stemming by suffixing a tilde.
Insource
1.24
Gerrit change 137733
Insource searches can be used to find any one
word
rendered on a page, but it's made for finding any phrase you might find – including
MediaWiki markup
(aka wikicode), on any page except redirects. This phrase completely ignores greyspace:
insource: "state state autocollapse"
matches
|state={{{state|autocollapse}}}
insource: word
insource: "
word1
word2
Greyspace characters are ignored, just as they are with word searches and exact-phrase searches.
insource:/
regexp
insource:/
regexp
/i
These are
regular expressions
. They aren't efficient, so only a few are allowed at a time on the search cluster, but they are very powerful. The regular expression matches case-sensitively by default; case-insensitivity can be opted in with the extra
, which is even less efficient.
Insource complements itself. On the one hand it has full text search for any word in the wikitext, instantly. On the other hand it can process a regexp search for any string of characters.
Regexes scan all the textual characters in a given list of pages; they don't have a word index to speed things up, and the process is interrupted if it runs for more than twenty seconds.
Regexes run last in a query, so to limit needless character-level scanning, every regex query should include other search terms to limit the number of documents that need to be scanned.
Often the best candidate to add to the regex query
insource:/
arg
is
insource:
arg
, where
arg
is the same (and uses no wildcards).
The syntax for the regexp is
insource:
no space, and then
regexp
. (No other parameter disallows a space. All the parameters except
insource:/
regexp
accept space after their colon.)
Insource indexed-search and regexp-search roles are similar in many respects:
Both search wikitext only.
Neither finds things "sourced" by a
transclusion
Neither does stemmed, fuzzy, or proximity searches.
Both want the fewest results, and both work faster when accompanied by another clause.
But indexed searches all ignore greyspace; wildcards searches do not match greyspace, so regexes are the only way to find an exact string of
any and all
characters, for example a sequence of two spaces.
Regexes are an entirely different class of search tool that make matching a literal string easy (basic, beginner use), and make matching by metacharacter expressions possible (advanced use) on the wiki.
See
#Regular expression searches
below.
The
insource
parameter treats words with embedded colons as one word. This affects search queries for templates, parser functions, URLs, wikilinks, HTML tags, and comments.
When possible, please avoid running a bare regexp search. See how this is always possible at
#Regular expression searches
, below.
To search for words that begin with
or
, such as
-in-law
or
!Kung
, use a case-insensitive
insource
query together with a simple search on the "plain" version of the term (to avoid a bare regexp search). For example,
"in-law" insource:/-in-law/i
or
"kung" insource:/!kung/i
Prefix and namespace
Prepending a namespace term like
file:
to a search query limits results to a specific
namespace
, instead of searching the entire wiki.
The default namespace is "Main".
Only one namespace name can be set from the search box query.
It must be the
first
term in the query, or, if used as part of a
prefix:
term, must appear as the
last
term in the query.
Two or more namespaces may be searched from the
Advanced
pane of the
search bar
found on the top of every search results page,
Special:Search
Your search domain, as a profile of namespaces, can be set here.
The namespaces list will then present itself on the first page of future search results to indicate the search domain of the search results.
To unset this, select the default namespace (shown in parentheses), select "Remember", and press Search.
The
search bar
graphically sets and indicates a search domain. "Content pages" (mainspace), "Multimedia" (File), "Everything" (
all
plus File), "Translations", etc., are hyperlinks that can activate the query in that domain, and then indicate this by going inactive (dark). But the query will override the search bar.
When a namespace or prefix is used in the query the search bar activations and indications may be misleading, so the search bar and the search box are mutually exclusive (not complementary) ways to set the search domain.
A namespace term overrides the search bar, and a
prefix:
term overrides a namespace.
To specify a namespace name, prefix it with a colon,
e.g.
talk:
Use
all:
to search across
all
namespaces, or
(a single colon) to search just the main article namespace.
The
all:
term does not include the File: namespace, which includes media content held at Commons such as PDF, which are all indexed and searchable.
When File is involved, a namespace modifier
local:
has an effect, otherwise it is ignored.
As with search parameters,
local:
and
all:
must be lowercase.
Namespaces names, though, are case insensitive.
Namespace aliases
are accepted.
talk: "Wind clock"
Find pages in the
Talk
namespace whose title or text contains the phrase "wind clock".
file: "Wind clock"
Find pages in
File
namespace, whose title, text, or media content contains the phrase "wind clock".
file: local: "Wind clock"
Filter out results from Commons wiki.
local: "Wind clock"
Ignored. Searches mainspace. Local is ignored unless File is involved.
prefix:
The
prefix:
parameter matches any number of first-characters of all pagenames in one namespace.
When the first letters match a namespace name and colon, the search domain changes.
Given a namespace only,
prefix:
will match all its pagenames.
Given one character only, it cannot be
(dash),
(quote), or
(double quote).
The last character cannot be a colon.
For pagenames that match, their subpage titles match by definition.
The
prefix:
parameter does not allow a space before a namespace, but allows whitespace before a pagename.
This term
always goes at the end
, so that pagename characters may contain quotation marks (
).
prefix:
cow
Find pages in mainspace whose title starts with the three letters
c o w
domestic
prefix:
cow
Find pages in mainspace whose title starts with the three letters
c o w
, and that contain the word "
domestic
".
domestic
prefix:
cow/
List any existing subpages of
Cow
but only if they contain the word "domestic". This is a very common search and is frequently built using a special URL parameter called
prefix=
domestic
prefix:
Talk:cow
List any subpages of
Talk:cow
, but only if they contain the word "domestic".
1967
prefix:
Pink Floyd
List any subpages of
Pink Floyd
, but only if it also contains the word "1967".
The
Translate extension
creates a sort of "language namespace" of translated versions of a page.
However, unlike namespace or prefix, which create the initial search domain, the
inlanguage
parameter is a
filter
of it. (See the next section.)
Exclude content from the search index
Content can be excluded from the search index by adding
class="navigation-not-searchable"
. This will instruct CirrusSearch to ignore this content from the search index (see
T162905
for more context).
Additionally content can be marked as auxiliary information by adding
class="searchaux"
This will instruct CirrusSearch to move the content from the main text to an auxiliary field that has lower importance for search and snippet highlighting.
This distinction is used for items such as image thumbnail descriptions, 'see also' sections, etc.
Filters
A filter will have multiple instances, or negated instances, or it can run as a standalone filtering a search domain.
A query is formed as terms that filter a search domain.
Adding another word, phrase, or parameter filters more. A highly refined search result may have very many Y/N filters when every page in the results will be addressed. (In this case ranking is largely irrelevant.)
Filtering applies critically to adding a regex term; you want as few pages as possible before adding a regex (because it can never have a prepared index for its search).
A namespace is a specified search domain but not a filter because a namespace will not run standalone.
prefix
will negate so it is a filter.
The search parameters below are filters for which there may be multiple instances.
Insource
(covered above) is also a filter, but
insource:/
regexp
is not a filter. Filters and all other search parameters are lowercase. (Namespaces are an exception, being case insensitive.)
Intitle and incategory
Word and phrase searches match in a title and match in the category box on bottom of the page. But with these parameters you can select titles
only
or category
only
cow*
Find articles whose title or text contains words that start with cow
intitle:foo
Find articles whose title contains foo. Stemming is enabled for foo.
intitle:"fine line"
Find articles whose title contains
fine line
. Stemming is disabled.
intitle:foo bar
Find articles whose title contains foo and whose title or text contains bar.
-intitle:foo bar
Find articles whose title does not contain foo and whose title or text contains bar.
incategory:Music
Find articles that are in Category:Music
incategory:"music history"
Find articles that are in Category:Music_history
incategory:"musicals" incategory:"1920"
Find articles that are in both Category:Musicals and Category:1920
-incategory:"musicals" incategory:"1920"
Find articles that are not in Category:Musicals but are in Category:1920
Intitle
and
incategory
are old search parameters. Incategory no longer searches any subcategory automatically, but you can now add multiple category pagenames manually.
1.31
Gerrit change 413896
Since
MediaWiki 1.31-wmf.23
Regular expression searches are supported for intitle:
intitle:/regex/, intitle:/regex/i
Everything written in the
#Regular expression searches
is also valid for these searches, including warnings.
When possible, please avoid running a bare regexp search. See how this is always possible at
#Regular expression searches
, below.
Deepcategory
Deep category search allows to search in category and all subcategories. The depth of the tree is limited by 5 levels currently (configurable) and the number of categories is limited by 256 (configurable). The deep search uses
SPARQL Category service from WDQS
. Keywords are
deepcategory
or
deepcat
. Example:
deepcat:"musicals"
Find articles that are in Category:Musicals or any of the subcategories.
The DeepCat gadget that previously implemented the parameter was sunsetted in January 2020.
Linksto
Linksto
finds wikilinks to a given
name
, not links to
content
. The input is the canonical, case sensitive, page
name
It must match the title line of the content page, exactly, before any title modifications of the letter-case.
(It must match its {{FULLPAGENAME}}, e.g. Help:CirrusSearch.)
Linksto
does not find redirects. It only finds [[wikilinks]], even when they are made by a template.
It does not find a link made by a URL, even if that URL is an internal wiki link.
To find all wikilinks to a "Help:Cirrus Search", if "Help:Searching" and "H:S" are redirects to it:
linksto: "Help:Cirrus Search"
linksto: Help:Searching
linksto: H:S
CirrusSearch -linksto: Help:CirrusSearch
finds articles that mention "CirrusSearch" but not in a wikilink.
Hastemplate
You can specify template usage with
hastemplate:
template
. Input the canonical pagename to find
all usage
of the template, but use any of its redirect pagenames finds
just that naming
. Namespace aliases are accepted, capitalization is entirely ignored, and redirects are found, all in one name-search. (Compare
boost-template
no default namespace;
linksto
no namespace aliases, case-sensitive, no redirects;
intitle
no redirects.)
Hastemplate
finds secondary (or meta-template) usage on a page: it searches the post-expansion inclusion. This is the same philosophy as for
words and phrases
from a template, but here it's for
templates
from a template. The page will be listed as having that content even though that content is not seen in the wikitext.
hastemplate: "quality image"
, finds "Template:Quality image" usage in your default search domain (namespaces).
hastemplate: portal:contents/tocnavbar
, finds mainspace usage of a "Contents/TOCnavbar" template in the Portal namespace.
For installations with the Translate extension,
hastemplate
searches get interference wherever
Template:Translatable template name
wraps the template name of a translatable template. Use
insource
instead.
Inlanguage
For installations with the Translate extension,
inlanguage
is important for highly refined searches and page counts.
inlanguage:
language code
will produce search results in that language only.
For example
to count all Japanese pages on the wiki
all: inlanguage: ja
to filter out German and Spanish pages in the Help namespace
help: -inlanguage: de -inlanguage: es
to ignore Translate, and where English is the base language, add
inlanguage:en
Contentmodel
The
contentmodel:
keyword allows to limit the search to pages of a specific content model. For possible models cf.
Content handlers
. E.g.:
To see only JSON pages:
contentmodel:json
subpageof
To find sub-pages.
subpageof:
ParentPage
For example
To find all subpages of CirrusSearch.
subpageof:CirrusSearch
Use double quotes if the parent page contains spaces.
subpageof:"Requests for comment"
To exclude subpages, add a title exclusion term containing a slash.
Since slash is a metacharacter, you have to use the regex format and escape the slash:
-intitle:/\//
unlike
prefix:
, do not include the page namespace in the keyword value. If you want to limit to sub-pages of a particular namespace use the namespace filter.
Articletopic
The
articletopic:
keyword allows filtering search results by topic.
For possible topics see
Help:CirrusSearch/articletopic
E.g.
articletopic:books
will filter the search results to articles about books.
articletopic:books|films
will filter to articles about books or films.
articletopic:books articletopic:films
will filter to articles that are about both books and films.
Only mainspace articles belong into topics, and topics are only available on Wikipedias.
Unlike other filters, articletopic also does page weighting: articles that are a stronger match for a topic will be higher in the search results (while articles that aren't about that subject at all will be removed from the result set completely).
Topic models are derived via
Machine Learning
Any given article receives a score on dozens of different topics, and therefore may appear under different keywords.
For instance, the article on Albert Einstein may appear as a "physics" article and a "biography" article.
All Wikipedias have scores available -- some have local-language topic models that have coverage on all articles.
Other languages do not have local models, and are using English-language scores assigned to articles in the local language that also exist in English Wikipedia.
The languages with such "cross-wiki" scores do not have 100% coverage -- depending on the language, it may only be something like 60% of articles that have topics available.
1.45
Gerrit change 1191677
This keyword allows to set a
boost
factor to influence the importance of the various topics you want to search for:
articletopic:books^2.0|fashion^0.2
– to list articles about books or fashion but will give more importance to the ones about books.
articletopic:books^100
– to give a strong importance to this keyword in comparison to other ranking criteria (other keywords or words, number of incoming links or the popularity of the page...)
This
boost
factor must be a positive number.
Articlecountry
This keyword allows to filter and rank pages based on prediction made by the
Article country
model.
The values it supports are documented at
Help:CirrusSearch/articlecountry
articlecountry:and
– filter pages that may be related to Andorra
articlecountry:bel|fra
– filter pages that may be related to Belgium or France.
Similar to
articletopic
this keyword may accept a
boost
factor.
Pageid
The
pageid:
keyword restricts search results to the given set of page IDs.
This is not really useful for manual searching; it can be used by software tools for checking whether a set of pages match the given set of search conditions (e.g. for re-validating cached search results).
creationdate / lasteditdate
You can filter search results by date using two filters:
lasteditdate:
– for when pages were last edited
creationdate:
– for when pages were first created (the date of their first revision).
This allows you to find recently updated content, pages that have not been updated in some time, or pages created within specific time periods.
All date queries use the local timezone of the wiki you are searching, your personal timezone settings do not effect the results.
You can add comparison operators before any date to constrain your search:
Operator
Meaning
Example
Description
after
creationdate:>2024
Pages created after 2024
>=
on or after
lasteditdate:>=2024
Pages last edited in 2024 or later
before
creationdate:<2025
Pages created before 2025
<=
on or before
lasteditdate:<=2020
Pages last edited in 2020 or earlier
Without an operator, the search looks for exact matches within that time period.
The precision of your search depends on how the date is provided.
When providing an absolute date it depends on how specific your date is:
Precision
Example
Description
year
creationdate:2025
Pages created anywhere in 2025
month
lasteditdate:2025-09
Pages last edited in September 2025
day
creationdate:2025-09-01
Pages created on September 1, 2025
Alternatively you can provide a relative date using either
now
or
today
The precision of the search will be determined by the keyword used.
The keyword can be suffixed by a minus sign (
) followed by a number and a suffix.
The following suffixes are available for use:
Keyword
Precision
Example
Description
now
hour
lasteditdate:now
Pages last edited in the current hour
now
hour
creationdate:now-1h
Pages created in the previous hour
now
hour
lasteditdate:>=now-1d
Pages last edited in the 24 previous hours
today
day
creationdate:today
Pages created today
today
day
lasteditdate:today-1d
Pages last edited yesterday
today
day
creationdate:>today-1y
Pages created anytime in the last year
While there's no single "range" operator, you can create date ranges by combining two date filters in the same query.
Example
Description
creationdate:>=2010 creationdate:<2020
Pages created in the 10's (from January 1, 2010 to January 1, 2020).
hasrecommendation
This keyword can be used to filter pages for which a machine learning model has made recommendation for (generally detecting improvements to make).
hasrecommendation:image
– filter pages for which a model recommended to add an image.
The types of recommendations depend on the model and wikis for which this system has been enabled.
For instance on WMF wikis there are models that may flag:
image
– articles for which a page image could be added.
image_section
– articles for which an image can be added to a section.
link
– articles for which a link can be added
This keyword is generally used by other tools such as
Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks
If the recommendation is stored with its
confidence score
the keyword can be used to filter using a
threshold
and/or
boost
using a factor.
For instance if you want to filter pages where a recommendation of type
tone
has a confidence score above 0.5 you can use:
hasrecommendation:tone>0.5
Similarly if you want the hasrecommendation to influence the ranking of the search results you can use a
boost
factor:
hasrecommendation:tone^1.0
You can also combine these two with:
hasrecommendation:tone^1.0>0.5
the confidence score
threshold
must be a decimal number between 0 and 1.
the
boost
factor must be a positive number
This keyword highly depends on the recommendation models enabled for a particular wiki and may not work on all the WMF wikis.
Page weighting
Weighting determines snippet, suggestions, and page relevance. The normal weight is one. Additional weighting is given through multipliers.
If the query is just words, pages that match them in order are given a boost. If you add any
explicit
phrases to your search, or for certain other additions, this "prefer phrase" feature is not applied.
Morelike
morelike:
page name 1
page name 2
|...|
page name n
Find articles whose text is most similar to the text of the given articles.
morelike:wasp|bee|ant
Find articles about stinging insects.
morelike:template:search|template:regex|template:usage
Find templates about regex searching for template usage on the wiki.
morelike
is a "greedy" keyword, meaning that it cannot be combined with other search queries. If you want to use other search queries, use
morelikethis
in your search:
morelikethis:bee hastemplate:"featured article"
Find articles about bees that also have the "featured article" template.
The
morelike:
query works by choosing a set of words in the input articles and run a query with the chosen words. You can tune the way it works by adding the following parameters to the search results URL:
cirrusMltMinDocFreq
– Minimum number of documents (per shard) that need a term for it to be considered.
cirrusMltMaxDocFreq
– Maximum number of documents (per shard) that have a term for it to be considered.
cirrusMltMaxQueryTerms
– Maximum number of terms to be considered.
cirrusMltMinTermFreq
– Minimum number of times the term appears in the input to doc to be considered. For small fields (
title
) this value should be 1.
cirrusMltMinWordLength
– Minimal length of a term to be considered. Defaults to 0.
cirrusMltMaxWordLength
– The maximum word length above which words will be ignored. Defaults to unbounded (0).
cirrusMltFields
(comma separated list of values) – These are the fields to use. Allowed fields are
title
text
auxiliary_text
opening_text
headings
and
all
cirrusMltUseFields
true
false
) – use only the field data. Defaults to
false
: the system will extract the content of the
text
field to build the query.
cirrusMltPercentTermsToMatch
– The percentage of terms to match on. Defaults to 0.3 (30 percent).
Example:
&cirrusMtlUseFields=yes&cirrusMltFields=title&cirrusMltMinTermFreq=1&cirrusMltMinDocFreq=1&cirrusMltMinWordLength=2
These settings can be made persistent by overriding
cirrussearch-morelikethis-settings
in
System message
Prefer-recent
Adding
prefer-recent:
anywhere in the query gives recently edited articles a slightly larger than normal boost in the page-ranking rules.
Prefer-recent is only applied when using the default
relevance
sort order
It defaults to boost only 60% of the score, in a large, 160-day window of time, which can be entered in the query as
prefer-recent:0.6,160
. This plays well with other page ranking rules, and is intended for most searches.
You can manipulate the rules:
prefer-recent:
boost
recent
Technically, "boost" is the proportion of score to scale, and "recent" is the half life in days.
The boost is more than the usual
multiplier
, it is an
exponential
boost.
The factor used in the exponent is the time since the last edit.
For example
prefer-recent:,7
Pages older than 7 days are boosted half as much, and pages older than 14 days are boosted half as much again, and so on.
For a simple "sort by date" in highly refined search results, where page ranking and boosting are largely meaningless, just boost the entire score.
prefer-recent:1,7
– weeks
prefer-recent:1,1
– days
prefer-recent:1,0.0007
– minutes
prefer-recent:1,0.0001
– 8.64 seconds
prefer-recent:1,0.00001
– seconds
Boost-templates
You can boost pages' scores based on what templates they contain. This can be applied to all search queries by declaring boosts via
MediaWiki:Cirrussearch-boost-templates
, or ad-hoc in individual queries via the
boost-templates:""
operator. If the
boost-templates
operator is set in a query, then the contents of
cirrussearch-boost-templates
are ignored.
Similar to the prefer-recent feature, boost-templates is applied as part of the default
relevance
sort order
. It has no effect on other search orders.
The syntax of the message is as follows:
Everything from a
character to the end of the line is considered a comment, and ignored.
Every non-blank line is interpreted as the exact name of a template that should receive boosting (including namespace prefix), followed by a pipe "|" character, followed by a number, followed by a "%" character.
Good examples:
Template:Important|150%
Template:Very_Very_Important|300%
Template:Less_important|50%
Bad examples:
Template:Foo|150.234234% # decimal points are not allowed.
Foo|150% # technically valid, but acts on transclusions of Foo (main space article) instead of Template:Foo.
Some examples:
boost-templates:"Template:Quality_Image|200%" incategory:china
Find files in the China category, sorting quality images first.
boost-templates:"Template:Quality_Image|200% Template:Low_Quality|50%" incategory:china
Find files in the China category, sorting quality images first and low-quality images last.
boost-templates:"Template:Quality_Image|200% Template:Low_Quality|50%" popcorn
Find files about popcorn, sorting quality images first and low-quality images last. Remember that through the use of the
cirrussearch-boost-templates
message this can be reduced to just
popcorn
Decimal points are not permitted in percentage values. Search scoring is such that fractions of a percent are unlikely to make a difference.
Beware that if you add very low or very high percentages via
cirrussearch-boost-templates
, they can poison the full-text scoring.
For example, if Wikipedia were to boost the "Featured article" template by 1 million percent, then, searches for any term mentioned in featured articles, would rank the featured article above even the dedicated article about that term.
Phrase matching would be similarly blown away, so a search like
brave new world
would return a featured article as first result even if it merely has those three words mentioned throughout it, instead of the more relevant article about
Brave New World
itself.
Regular expression searches
Warning:
Try to avoid running bare
insource:/
regex
searches. They are likely to timeout, giving partial results, and they can block the regex queries of other users.
A basic indexed search finds
words
rendered visibly on a page.
Punctuation and symbols--like periods, dashes, brackets, slashes, math and computing symbols, etc.--are merely boundaries for the
words
They are generally not included in an indexed search.
Mostly that search behavior is wanted by the user.
However, sometimes one needs a more precise search.
To get around the limits of index-based searches regex searches can be used.
These specify a
regular expression
that the raw wikitext of the page being searched for has to match.
How regex searches work
On large wikis with millions of pages, running a regular expression on every single one (or every single one in a set of namespaces) would be impossible to implement efficiently.
In order to optimize regex searches, the search system attempts to extract three-character sequences of text that any string matching the regular expression must also contain.
These are known as trigrams.
For example, the regex
foo(bar|baz)?
can only match strings starting with "foo".
If any such trigrams are found, they are checked against a separate index of all pages' wikitext, and the regex is only run on pages containing the relevant trigrams.
If at least one trigram is relatively rare, such as
||}
, then the search will complete relatively fast –
searching for that on this wiki
completes in only a few seconds.
On the other hand, if trigrams cannot be extracted from a regex (possibly because the regex is too complicated to parse or doesn't require the wikitext to contain any specific 3-character strings), or the only trigrams that can be extracted are extremely common (like
the
), then the domain of pages to run the regex on will be extremely large.
The search system has to scour these character-by-character, which is very slow and likely to time out (resulting in incomplete results).
Using the index first to filter results
Hence, when using an
insource://
(a regex of any kind), consider adding other search terms that will limit the regex search domain as much as possible.
There are many search terms that use an index and so instantly provide a more refined search domain for the /regex/.
In order of general effectiveness:
insource:""
with quotation marks, duplicating the regex except
without the slashes
or escape characters, is often helpful.
intitle
(without regex search),
incategory
, and
linksto
are excellent filters.
hastemplate:
is a very good filter.
word1 word2 word3
", with or without the quotation marks, are good.
namespace:
is practically useless, but may enable a slow regex search to complete.
For example, the following regexes in
italic
each match one specific string, with an index-based search limiting the domain of the regex in
bold
insource:"debian.reproducible.net"
insource:/debian\.reproducible\.net/
insource:"
insource:/http:\/\/www\.mediawiki\.org/
insource:"c:\program files (x86)"
insource:/C\:\\Program Files \(x86\)/i
insource:"{{template}}"
insource:/"{{template}}<"\/"tag>"/
insource:""
insource:/\<\/references>/
insource:"[[title|link label]]'s"
insource:/"[[title|link label]]'s"/
To test a bare regex query you can create a page with test patterns, and then use the
prefix
parameter with that fullpagename.
The match will be highlighted.
It searches that page (in the database) and its subpages.
For example:
[[Special:Search/insource:/regex/ prefix:{{FULLPAGENAME}}]]
finds the term
regex
on this page
This example works from a link on a page, but {{
FULLPAGENAME
}} doesn't function in the search box.
Search terms that do not increase the efficiency of a regex search are the page-scoring operators:
morelike
boost-template
, and
prefer-recent
Regular expression syntax
Metacharacters
This section covers how to escape metacharacters used in regex searches.
For the actual meaning of the metacharacters see the
explanation of the syntax
Searching for an exact string requires a regex, but using a regex term warrants limiting the search domain if possible.
Add
a regex term, rather than search with a bare regex, when possible.
Start
by noting the number of pages in a previous search before using an exact string search. Querying with an exact string is best with a filtered search domain.
For example:
to search a namespace, gauge the number of pages with a single term that is a namespace. This will list the number of pages in that namespace.
starting out to find again what you may have seen, like "wiki-link" or "(trans[in]clusion)" start with namespace and insource filters.
There are some notable differences from standard regex metacharacters:
The dot
metacharacter stands for any character including a newline, so
.*
matches across lines.
The number
sign means something, and must be escaped.
10
The
and
are only available for
intitle://
searches, but not for
insource://
. When matching titles
and
match the beginning and end of the title. Like "grep" (global per line, regular expression, print each line), each
insource://
is a "global per document, regular expression, search-results-list each document" per document.
and
support a multi-digit numeric range like
[0-9]
does, but without regard to the number of character positions, or the range in each position, so
<9-10>
works, and even
<1-111>
works.
Character classes
Regex search supports a minimal set of character classes.
While negated shorthands such as
\W
are not available the classes can be negated as part of a character class, as in
[^\w]
CirrusSearch
Description
\w
Matches any alphanumeric ascii character and the underscore. Equivalent to [A-Za-z0-9_]
\s
Matches the space character and a variety of unicode spaces. Equivalent to [\f\n\r\t\v\u0020\u00a0\u1680\u2000-\u200a\u2028\u2029\u202f\u205f\u3000\ufeff]
\d
Matches any ASCII digit. Equivalent to [0-9]
Escape codes
Regex search also supports a few escape codes that make it possible to search for unprintable characters.
CirrusSearch
Description
\r
carriage return (CR)
\n
line feed (LF)
\t
tab
\uHHHH
Can represent any unicode character. It must be provided exactly 4 hexadecimal characters representing the codepoint.
Surrogate pairs
are represented with two sequences in a row. Searching for half a surrogate pair will not return any results.
Escaping metacharacters
There are two ways to escape metacharacters. They are both useful at times, and sometimes concatenated side-by-side in the escaping of a string.
Backslash-escape one of them \
char
. The insource:/
regex
/ uses slashes to delimit the regex. Giving /reg/exp/ is ambiguous, so you must write /reg\/exp/.
Put a string of them in double quotes "
string
". Because
escaping a character can't hurt
, you can escape any character along with any possible metacharacters in there. Escaping with quotes is cleaner.
You can't mix methods, but you can concatenate them.
Double-quotes escaping
using insource:/"
regex
"/ is an easy way to search for many kinds of strings, but you can't backslash-escape anything inside a double-quoted escape.
/"[[page/name|{{temp-late"/
instead of
/\[\[page\/name\|\{\{temp\-late/
/"literal back\slash"/
is as good as
/literal back\\slash/
But
/"This \" fails"/
always.
And
/"This \/ depends"/
. It finds the
\/
literally, which is not the
you probably wanted.
Backslash-escape
using insource:/
regex
/ allows escaping the " and / delimiters, but requires taking into account metacharacters, and escaping any:
To match a
delimiter character use
\/
To match a
delimiter character use
\"
The escaped metacharacters would be
\~\@\#\&\*\(\)\-\+\{\}\[\]\|\<\>\?\.\\
The equivalent expression escaped with double-quotes is
"~@#&*()-+{}[]|\<>?.\"
The simplest algorithm to create the basic string-finding expression using insource:/"
regex
"/, need not take metacharacters into account except for the " and / characters:
Write
the/str"ing
out. (The /" delimiters "/ are not shown.)
Replace
with
"\""
(previous double-quote: stop, concatenate, quote restart).
Replace
with
"\/"
(stop, concatenate, start).
You get
insource:/"the"\/"str"\""ing"/
, showing concatenation of the two methods.
While refining a regex on a search results page, keep in mind that the snippet "wikitext" has modified spacing. Regexes are sensitive to space characters, so copying from snippets is dangerous.
The square-bracket notation for creating your own character-class
also
escapes
its
metacharacters. To target a literal right square bracket in your character-class pattern, it must be backslash escaped, otherwise it can be interpreted as the closing delimiter of the character-class pattern definition.
The first position of a character class will also escape the right square bracket. Inside the delimiting square brackets of a character
class
, the dash character also has special meaning (range) but it too can be included literally in the class the same way as the right square bracket can.
For example both of these patterns target a character that is either a dash or a right square bracket or a dot:
[-.\]]
or
[].\-]
For general examples using metacharacters:
insource:"2+2=4" insource:/"2+2=4"/
matches "2 + 2 = 4", with zero spaces between the characters.
insource:"2 + 2 = 4" insource:/2 ?\+ ?2 ?= ?4/
match with zero or one space in between. The equals = sign is not a metacharacter, but the plus + sign is.
insource:"<
tag
>[[link|2\3?]]\tag
>" insource:/"<
tag
>[[link|2\3?]]<
"\/"
tag
>"/
insource:""
insource:/\<\/references>/
Regex on titles
The
insource
keyword does only search the page source content.
To run regex searches on the title strings
intitle:/regex/
can be used.
Advanced example
For example, using metacharacters to find the usage of a template called
Val
having, inside the template call, an unnamed parameter containing a possibly signed, three to four digit number, possibly surrounded by space characters,
and
on the same page, inside a template Val call, a named argument
fmt=commas
having any allowable spaces around it, (it could be the same template call, or a separate one):
hastemplate:val insource:"fmt commas" insource:
\{\{ *[Vv]al *\|[^}]*fmt *= *commas/ insource:/\{\{ *[Vv]al *\|[^}]*[-+]?[0-9]{3,4} *[|}]
Note that the = sign in "fmt commas" is not needed but that adding it would not change the search results.
It is fast because it uses two filters so that every page the regex crawls has the highest possible potential.
Geo Search
Searching based on the (primary) coordinates associated with pages.
Depends on
Extension:GeoData
and
{{#coordinates:}}
bounded
You can limit search to pages identified as being near some specified geographic coordinates.
The coordinates can either be specified as a , pair, or by providing a page title from which to source the coordinates.
A distance to limit the search to can be prepended if desired.
Examples:
neartitle:"San Francisco"
neartitle:"100km,San Francisco"
nearcoord:37.776,-122.39
nearcoord:42km,37.776,-122.39
boosted
You can alternatively increase the score of pages within a specified geographic area.
The syntax is the same as bounded search, but with boost- prepended to the keyword.
This effectively doubles the score for pages within the search range, giving a better chance for nearby search results to be near the top.
boost-neartitle:"San Francisco"
boost-neartitle:"100km,San Francisco"
boost-nearcoord:37.776,-122.39
boost-nearcoord:42km,37.776,-122.39
File properties search
1.28
Gerrit change 311061
Since MediaWiki 1.28, CirrusSearch supports indexing and searching of properties of files in the
File:
namespace. This includes:
file media type
MIME type
size
width & height
resolution
bit depth for files that support these
While these predicates are useful only for files, they by themselves do not limit search to the
File:
namespace. It is recommended to include this namespace in a search or restrict the search to only this namespace when using these conditionals.
filetype
Searching for file type allows to retrieve files according to their classification, such as office documents, videos, raster images, vector images, etc. The following types currently exist:
UNKNOWN
BITMAP
DRAWING
AUDIO
VIDEO
MULTIMEDIA
OFFICE
TEXT
EXECUTABLE
ARCHIVE
3D
This list may be extended in the future. See also
MEDIATYPE_*
constants in
defines.php
The syntax of the search is:
filetype:{type}
. Example:
filetype:video
– looks for all videos
The filetype search is not case-sensitive.
filemime
Matches file MIME type. The syntax is:
filemime:{MIMEtype}
– look for files of this MIME type
The argument can be quoted to specify exact match. Without quotes, partial matches to components of MIME type will be accepted too.
Examples:
filemime:"image/png"
– look for files with MIME type exactly
image/png
filemime:pdf
– look for all PDF documents
-filemime:pdf
– skip all PDF documents (notably on Commons)
The MIME type search is not case-sensitive.
filesize
Search for file of given size, in kilobytes (kilobyte means 1024 bytes). The syntax is:
filesize:{number}
or
filesize:>{number}
– file with size at least given number
filesize:<{number}
– file with size no more than given number
filesize:{number},{number}
– file with size between given numbers
Examples:
filesize:>20
or
filesize:20
– files 20KB and bigger
filesize:<1024
– files smaller than 1MB
filesize:100,500
– files with sizes between 100KB and 500KB
File measures
It is possible to search for specific file measures: width, height, resolution (which is defined as square root of height × width), and bit depth. Not all files may have these properties. The syntax is:
{measure}:{number}
– file with measure that equals to given number
{measure}:>{number}
– file with measure that is at least given number
{measure}:<{number}
– file with measure that is no more than given number
{measure}:{number},{number}
– file with measure that is between given numbers
Where
measure
can be:
filew
or
filewidth
– file width
fileh
or
fileheight
– file height
fileres
– file resolution (see above)
filebits
– file bit depth
Examples:
filew:>800 fileh:>600
– files that are at least 800×600 pixels in size
filebits:16
– files with 16-bit color depth
fileheight:100,500
– file between 100 and 500 pixels high
Wikibase search
The
Wikibase
extension defines some search keywords in order to make it easier to search for certain Wikibase items.
This is useful on
Wikidata
and other Wikibase sites, including to search for images with
Structured data
on
Wikimedia Commons
See
Help:WikibaseCirrusSearch
for details.
Cross-wiki search results
There are two kinds of cross-wiki results that may be shown when searching on Wikipedia.
Cross-project search (also known as interwiki search, sister search, or sister projects search) shows additional results from other projects (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, etc.) shown to the side on the Wikipedia results page.
Cross-project search is available on most Wikipedias with sister projects.
Cross-language search (see
blog post
) refers to additional results shown below the main results that are from a Wikipedia in a different language.
Cross-language search uses a heavily modified and optimized version of a light-weight language detector called
TextCat
Cross-language search is currently only available on a few Wikipedias (see TextCat link for details).
Explicit sort orders
In addition to the default relevance based sort, CirrusSearch can provide results using a few other explicit sort orders.
Specifying a sorting order other than
relevance
will disable all search keywords that affect scoring, such as
prefer-recent
or
boost-templates
The keywords will still be parsed, but they will have no effect.
Sorting options are currently available from the MediaWiki API by providing the
srsort
parameter.
Guidance:
Sorting options can be manually added to a search URL by adding
&sort=
order
, for example:
&sort=
last_edit_desc
Valid sort orders include:
&sort=
incoming_links_asc
Lowest to highest number of incoming links. This is approximately from least to most popular.
&sort=
incoming_links_desc
Highest to lowest number of incoming links. This is approximately from most to least popular.
&sort=
last_edit_asc
From least recently to most recently edited
&sort=
last_edit_desc
From most to least recently edited
&sort=
create_timestamp_asc
From least to most recently created
&sort=
create_timestamp_desc
From most to least recently created
&sort=
just_match
A simple relevance sort based only on text matching
&sort=
random
Randomized
&sort=
relevance
A relevance sort taking into account many features of the document
&sort=
title_natural_asc
Sort by title ascending
&sort=
title_natural_desc
Sort by title descending
&sort=
user_random
Randomized, but stable per user. Each user will see a unique, seemingly random order of results, but that order will remain the same every time that specific user runs the same search.
&sort=
none
Unsorted, arbitrarily ordered lists. Preferred for large result sets.
Interaction among search options
Some search options when used together may interfere with or modify their operation when used alone.
Search options that impact relevance such as
prefer-recent
boost-templates
, and
boost-neartitle
have no effect when sort is not relevance. Keyword
morelike
may have marginal impact.
Interface for advanced options
Advanced Search Interface
The
AdvancedSearch
extension adds an improved interface to the search page allowing the use of several options described above in a user-friendly manner. See
here for the user manual
See also
Extension:CirrusSearch
Completion Suggester
– the incremental search feature of CirrusSearch
Wikimedia Search Platform/Search/Glossary
– definitions, context, and links for terms related to search.
See
Help:Searching
for MWSearch, used by the many wikis that don't have a search extension.
Notes and references
Note that the
tagline
is not part of the actual content.
To see the searchable content for a page append
?action=cirrusdump
to the URL.
Stop words are rarely called for in CirrusSearch, except for when they are in certain kinds of phrases, as explained below.
CirrusSearch parameters do not use a consistent way to handle these search terms.
The same analyzer
used to index the wikitext is also used to interpret the query.
For example, common terms on this wiki, MediaWiki.org, are, redundantly, (searched):
udp2log
or
udp2log2 (though the extra 2 will affect ranking)
html2wt
or
wt2html
log2ip
or
ip2log
There's test2wiki, wiki2xml, wiki2dict, apache2handler, apache2ctl, etc.
CirrusSearch regex do not address the newline character directly, but a dot
will match a newline.
A slow regex search cannot disable search, but can disable another's regex search, since there are only a limited number of regex searches allowed at a time.
Prefix does not match on first-characters of fullpagenames, so you cannot search two namespaces at once just because they start with the same letters, such as both
namespace
and
namespace talk
in one query.
For the formal definition see the
Lucene grammar for regular expressions
Class RegExp
, Lucene RegExp syntax
External links
From Lucene
, highly relevant documentation.
Full specifications in the extension's browser tests
As of 2017
Extension:CirrusSearch/Profiles
– sets of tunable parameters that influence various aspect of the indexing
Wikimedia blog articles related to search
WMF Global Search
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