FFXIclopedia:Searching

{| width="100%" style="border: solid 2px #A3B1BF; background: #F5FAFF" | Searching FFXIclopedia

This article provides a detailed overview of FFXIclopedia's search feature, and instructions on using external search engines, such as Google, to find information.

FFXIclopedia search
 Enter your keywords in the search box.
 * Go - (or Enter on keyboard) takes you to the article.
 * Search - returns a list of articles and additional search options.

Go is case sensitive
If you wanted ENM Reward Exchange and got something else, this is probably the reason. The "go" function uses an algorithm to decide what page you're likely to be interested in, and this usually masks its case sensitivity - but not always.

Avoid short and common words
If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about"), you may see many irrelevant results.

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, therefore the name Ea's Brais can be found only by searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with  ' s is an exception in that it can be found also by searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.

Namespaces searched by default
The search only applies to the namespaces selected in the user's 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.

The source text is searched
The source text (what one sees in the edit box, also called wiki text) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links.

External search engines
Various search engines can provide domain-specific searches, which let you search FFXIclopedia specifically. Searches are based on the text as shown by the browser, so wiki markup is irrelevant.

In general, external search engines are faster than a FFXIclopedia search. However, because the search engine's cache is based on when the site was indexed, the search may not return newly created pages. Similarly, the search engine's cached version of the page will not be as up-to-date as the link to FFXIclopedia itself.

Adapted from Wikipedia:Searching