Help:Searching

To search the Super Mario Wiki:

• There should be a small search box at the side of the screen, marked search, followed by Go and Search. Just type what you're looking for into the search box and press the Enter key. Or, click Go / Search.

The most important search tip is: don't search for only words in quotes. Try the search without quotes first. If that's not good enough, put as many words as possible outside the quotes or add some more to narrow the search.

Search facility of the MarioWiki

Limiting results

MarioWiki's default search mode will turn up results with any of the words in your query. To limit to results that include all words, put a "+" at the beginning of each word to return only pages containing both words, like Google's default mode.

You can also do a phrase search by enclosing words in quotes. This 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.

Avoid short and common words

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.

Wildcards

You can use some limited wildcards if you need to. However, wildcard searches are slower, so go easy on the poor server.

Words in single quotes

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.

An apostrophe is identical to a single quote. 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.

Namespaces searched by default

The search only applies to articles and galleries by default. To search the other namespaces, check or uncheck the tickboxes in "Add namespaces" box found at the bottom of the search interface.

Searching the file namespace means searching the file descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the file description pages.

The displayed text is searched

The displayed text (what one sees rendered on the page) is searched, not the wikitext. This distinction is relevant when attempting to search for specific formatting or syntax. To search the wikitext instead, use the format insource:"Text goes here".

Google

You can also use the Google search engine to search the Super Mario Wiki:

• Search the wiki with Google