Help:Searching
These are some hints about the search box that appears on every Wikipedia page.
All search terms must be present. Only pages that contain all the words exactly as you typed them in will be returned. So if you didn't get any results, leave out one or more terms, or make sure that all search terms were spelled correctly. Furthermore, if you searched for "Horse", then articles that contain "Horses" but not "Horse" won't be shown.
Avoid short and common words. This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.
Search is case-insensitive. The searches for "fortran", "Fortran" and "FORTRAN" all return the same results.
Only main namespace searched. The search only applies to the main namespace (those articles without "wikipedia:" or "talk:" or "user:" in front). The main namespace contains the encyclopedia proper.
Boolean search possible. You can use the words "and", "or" and "not" and parentheses in order to formulate more complicated requests. If none of those words is specified, "and" is used by default. For instance, "indian not american" will return all pages with the word "indian" which don't contain the word "american". The search "(Adolph or Adolf) and Hitler" will return all pages which contain "Hitler" and either "Adolf" or "Adolph".
No regular expressions. You cannot use regular expressions. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it.
Wildcards are not supported. You cannot use ? or * to search for extensions on words. If you want to search for Wiki entires with either "boat" or "boats" you have to type both terms in like this: (boat or boats)
Google Search of Wikipedia
By following the link below, you can use the Google search engine to search Wikipedia. Google silently ignores stop words and indexes all namespaces. Google's index may be a bit outdated.