Help:Searching

Overview
The quickest way to find information in the Research Wiki is to look it up directly. On the right-hand side of your screen there is a "Search Learning &amp; How-To's" box with two buttons under it labeled "by country" and "by topic".  Search by keyword, or browse:


 * Enter a search term - then hit enter to find articles that match.
 * by country - A list of articles for every country in the world.
 * by topic - Browse topic categories for related articles in many subjects

How it works
Here's how the search works:


 * The search looks for the words in the title first
 * Next, article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e., it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click “”, not the rendered page. This means that content coming from an included template will not be picked up, but the target of piped links will be.
 * Even if you enclose a phrase in quotes, the search looks for each word individually. e.g., if you enter "world war 2" it will return pages that contain "world" and "war" and "2".
 * The search is not case-sensitive, so "FamilySearch", "familysearch" and "FAMILYSEARCH" all give the same result.

Restricting the search
On the search results page, you'll see "Advanced Search" on the left. This searches "namespaces," a broad category of types of articles that are in the Research Wiki. The "Main" namespace includes all research help articles. The User namespace includes information about the people who contribute to the wiki. See more information about namespaces.

By default only the namespaces specified in your preferences will be searched. Logged-in users can change their preferences to specify the namespaces they want to search by default. This can be done by selecting and deselecting boxes in the ”search” section of user preferences.