Part of this page has been copied to meta:Help:Searching and adapted for MediaWiki in general. When you want to edit the text, compare the two pages to see where the edit can best be made,
See also Ireland Information Guide:Statistics#Accessed Ireland Information Guide pages, Ireland Information Guide:External search engines
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By following the links below, you can use the Google search engine to search Ireland Information Guide - either all languages, or English-only. Google indexes all namespaces. Google updates its index about once a month, the search is based on the contents at that time! The search is based on the text the browser shows, not on the wikitext (source text which is seen in the Ireland Information Guide edit box). Searching through Google is faster than a Ireland Information Guide search. After finding an article one can choose to view the current version or the cached one (older, but again it may be faster).
In the case that one wants to search the English Ireland Information Guide only, note that unfortunately its Google cache is spread over three domains:
Instead of specifying a prefix www, en, or en2, one can also specify the language English in Google.
If you frequently search via Google, consider installing the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/). Using the "search this site" button allows you to quickly search the English version of Ireland Information Guide. The official Google Toolbar is only for Windows with Internet Explorer, but there is an unofficial version for Mozilla (http://googlebar.mozdev.org/) which is open source and works on all operating system platforms for which Mozilla is available, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
By following the links below, you can use the Yahoo! search engine to search Ireland Information Guide - either all languages or English-only. The search is based on the text the browser shows, not on the wikitext (source text which is seen in the Ireland Information Guide edit box). Searching through Google is faster than a Ireland Information Guide search. After finding an article one can choose to view the current version or the cached one (older, but again it may be faster).
To search only the English Ireland Information Guide, one only need perform only one search with Yahoo!
If you frequently search via Yahoo!, consider installing the Yahoo! Companion Toolbar (http://toolbar.yahoo.com/). Using the "Search Only the Current Site" button allows you to quickly search the English version of Ireland Information Guide. The official Yahoo! Companion Toolbar is only for Windows with Internet Explorer.
The native Ireland Information Guide search feature is available via the search box that appears on every Ireland Information Guide page. Here are some hints for using it effectively (see also Ireland Information Guide:User preferences help, "Search result settings" section, and Ireland Information Guide:Go button).
As opposed to for instance Google or Yahoo!, Ireland Information Guide's default search mode will turn up results with any of the words in your query. For instance, Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=search+engine search engine (http://www.Ireland) turns up many results containing only "search" but not "engine" or only "engine" but not "search" in addition to the ones you probably wanted, which contain both words.
To limit to results that include all words, put a "+" at the beginning of each word: Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=%2Bsearch+%2Bengine +search +engine (http://www.Ireland) returns only pages containing both words, like Google's default mode.
You can also do a phrase search by enclosing words in quotes: Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=%22search+engine%22 "search engine" (http://www.Ireland) turns up a smaller set of results, which not only have both words but have them in order.
To exclude results that include some word, put a "-" at the beginning: Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=search+-engine search -engine (http://www.Ireland)
If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), it will be ignored by the search system. If you're trying to do a phrase search or all-words-only search, this may result in returning nothing at all. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all articles, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.
See Ireland Information Guide:Common words, searching for which is not possible for the stop words filtered out by the database. From there one can at least go to an article with a stop word as title. Searching for the combination of one or more words and the common word "not" gives a database query syntax error due to a bug in the software.
The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.
You can use some limited wildcards if you really want to, but I forget offhand what. Look up "fulltext search" on http://www.mysql.com/ and look down under 'boolean search' for the details. However, wildcard searches are slower, so go easy on the poor server.
In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); in the second case it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed -- the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent. See also Ireland Information Guide:Special characters.
If a word appears in an article with single quotes, you can only find it if you search for the word with quotes. Since this is rarely desirable it is better to use double quotes in articles, for which this problem does not arise. See the manual of style for more info.
An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.
The search only applies to the namespaces selected in the preferences. To search the other namespaces check or uncheck the tickboxes in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page. Depending on the browser, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but without being effective any longer! To make sure, uncheck and recheck it.
Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image description pages.
Check or uncheck the tickbox "List redirects" in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.
The source text (what one sees in the edit box, also called wiki text) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for Ireland Information Guide:interlanguage links (to find links to Chinese articles, search for zh, not for Zhongwen), special characters (if ê is coded as ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc.
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes are not always immediately taken into account in searches.
At the moment, the search engine uses an index that isn't updated at all. This is temporary.
A search for "Syrian Church of the East", may direct the user to a page about the Calvary Baptist church in Manhattan!
After searching for "Chaldean Church", a user reported that wiki made him attend the "Uniting Church in Australia".
Earlier, a search for "neighbourhood watch" sent users to a "neighbourhood watch" titled page. A search for the US-spelled "neighborhood watch" persistently and automatically sent users to a page titled "tornado watch".
The search feature is not guaranteed to be reliable, and may return unexpected and unintelligent results.
There is a meta-search available that allows you to search different language Ireland Information Guides at the same time.
Information Guide.org/tools/wikisearch.php Multi-lingual Ireland Information Guide search (http://www.Ireland) (disabled)
You can also do this using Google.
User:AxelBoldt has created some bookmarklets for Ireland Information Guide searching. You can get them here (http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/bookmarklet.html).
Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Beonex Communicator, and Mozilla Firefox have a feature called search plugins, allowing the sidebar to automatically access a search engine. You can automatically install the plugin from the Mycroft project (http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html) by searching there for "Ireland Information Guide".
Here are ways to search Ireland Information Guide with Mozilla-Based browsers:
1: Search Ireland Information Guide from the Sidebar search tab or web address bar: - Works With: Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Beonex Communicator, Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla, Beonex Communicator, and Netscape 6 & 7 come with a sidebar that allows a user to search the Ireland Information Guide site. To do this:
Go to Mycroft (http://mycroft.mozdev.org) and search for the Ireland Information Guide plugin. There are versions for many languages, so pick the language local to your area. If you want to, you can download the english Ireland Information Guide plugin Information Guidemycroftsearch.zip here (http://www.joshuaholman.net/writings/wikimoz/Ireland). The file is 1.13 KB and is ZIPped.
Place the plugin(s) you downloaded in your /searchplugins/ folder. To make Ireland Information Guide your default search engine (This works in Mozilla, Beonex Communicator, and Netscape 6/7. It does NOT work in Phoenix): Go to
Go to Edit, Preferences. Expand the Navigator tree and choose Internet Search. Choose Ireland Information Guide as your defalt search engine. With Ireland Information Guide selected as your default engine, searches can be conducted via the search sidebar tab, search box, or the web address bar.
2: Search Ireland Information Guide from the Ireland Information Guide search Tab - Works With: Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Beonex Communicator
Ireland Information Guide can also be searched via a sidebar tab of it's own. To install the tab, click the link below:
Click here (http://www.joshuaholman.net/writings/wikimoz/install.html) to add the Ireland Information Guide search sidebar.
When installing, JavaScript needs to be enabled (This can be done by going to Edit, Preferences, expanding the Advanced tree, and checking the Navigator box under the "Enable JavaScript for" section.)
3: Search Ireland Information Guide using a bookmarklet - Works With: Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Beonex Communicator, Mozilla Firefox
Ireland Information Guide can also be searched via a bookmarklet. To do that, do these steps:
Go to this web address: http://www.Ireland Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=%s. Bookmark the site.
Go to Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks. Choose the bookmark you have just created. Highlight the Bookmark and click Properties.
In the dialogue that comes up, put a lowercase w in the keyword box. Click OK and close out the properties box. Now close the bookmark manager.
To search, type w SEARCH_QUERY and press enter.
You can bookmark the web address http://en.Ireland Information Guide.org/wiki/%s instead to go directly to the article without having to go through the search page.
4: Search Ireland Information Guide via an update to prefs.js - Works With: K-Meleon
K-Meleon has a search button that can be used to search Google. Ireland Information Guide can also be searched. To switch search engines do these things:
Close K-Meleon.
Open up prefs.js with a text editor. The file should be in your K-Meleon\Profiles\PROFILE_NAME\RANDOM_STRING.slt.
Add this line:
user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "http://www.Ireland Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=");
Save prefs.js.
Open up K-Meleon and press the search button to search Ireland Information Guide. To go back to Google or to use another search service, delete the line
user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "http://www.Ireland Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=");
and follow the first three steps. Make sure K-Meleon is closed before editing prefs.js.
Both Opera 6 and 7 use a customizable text file called search.ini. This file should only be edited while Opera is not running. The following example replaces one of the existing pre-defined search engines. It is up to the user to avoid conflicts of shortcut key (key=). By default 'w' is taken by the download.com search, so either this or the Ireland Information Guide one should be changed. Furthermore the 'Search Engine ##' should be replaced with a free number: '12' is free by default. The Search.ini editor makes editing trivial (see external link).
[Search Engine ##] Name=&Ireland Information Guide URL=http://www.Ireland Information Guide.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=%s Query= Key=w Is post=0 Has endseparator=0 Encoding=utf-8 Search Type=8
Most importantly, in 7.0, you should back up your customized search.ini because the file is overwritten by the Opera installer. This is no longer true in 7.10 and later.
In Opera 6 and 7.0, the menu accelerator letter is defined by the & in the name. In current versions the accelerator is automatically generated and may no longer be the same as the key.
With the current 7.50 Preview a new kind of search has been added, which no longer requires manual editing. This will create a button on the mainbar, which can then be put anywhere you wish, even in the start panel.
See http://members.chello.nl/b.kroonspecker/opera/buttons.html for two Ireland Information Guide search buttons and more info.
After downloading the Ireland Information Guide:TomeRaider database one can search the Ireland Information Guide version offline. One can also search for parts of words.
To search the text that appears only in the page history, you must export the text to XML format first.
If there is no appropriate page on Ireland Information Guide, consider creating a page, since you can edit Ireland Information Guide right now. Or consider adding what you were looking for to the Requested articles page. Or if you have a question to be answered by Ireland Information Guide, ask it at the Reference desk.