Help:Searching

From Ciscowiki

The quickest way to find information in the CiscoWiki is to look it up directly. On the right-hand side of your screen there is a Search box with two buttons under it labeled "Go" and "Search".

• Go - (or Enter on keyboard) Typing the name of the article you are looking for and clicking on Go takes you automatically to the article, if it exists.

If the article does not exist, you will get a page saying that "No page was found under that name" and it will give you the option to "create a page". In addition, the page will show also some of the articles containing a match to the name of the article you are looking for.

• Search - Typing the name of the article you are looking for and clicking on Search searches the text of all pages on the wiki (with some restrictions, see below).

If you clicked 'search', or you clicked 'go' and the page you were looking for did not exist, you will be presented with a list of articles that matched your search criteria (or a message that no matches were found). See figures above.

To find out more about how to add a page using the Search option, please refer to the Adding Content link under the Navigation menu.

How it works

Here's how the search works:

• Only the article content is searched - the page title is ignored.
• The article content is searched in its raw (wikitext) form - i.e. it searches the text that appears in the edit box when you click 'edit', 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 "BGP Configuration on the 3700 Series" it will return pages that contain "BGP" and "Configuration" and "on" and "the" and "3700" and "Series".
• The search is not case-sensitive, so "BGP", "bgp" and "Bgp" all give the same result.

Restricting the search

If you click the 'Search' 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 'Talk' pages. Tick the namespaces you require for this search.

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.

External links