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Help:Searching
From Lostpedia
Searching Lostpedia when using the Monobook (default) skin
- A basic search is performed by entering the relevant term(s) in the search box.
- This is at the left side of the screen.
- Clicking Go (or Enter on the keyboard) will automatically take you to the article, if it exists.
- Clicking Search will return a list of articles that match the terms you enter.
Searching Lostpedia when using the Lostbook skin
- A basic search is performed by entering the relevant term(s) in the search box.
- This is at the top right of the screen.
- Clicking Go (or Enter on the keyboard) will automatically take you to the article, if it exists.
- Clicking Search will return a list of articles that match the terms you enter.
- The Google search box will use Google to search for articles from Lostpedia.com (rather than the whole internet).
Effective searching
Some hints that will help you use the Lostpedia search feature effectively:
Limiting results
Lostpedia's default search will return articles with any of the words in your query.
- For example, doctor sawyer returns results containing doctor but not sawyer, and also sawyer but not doctor - in addition to the results that you probably wanted; those which contained both words.
- To only return results including both words, add a + to the start of each word: +sawyer +doctor returns only pages containing both terms.
- To be even more specific, you can enclose the terms within quotes: "doctor sawyer" turns up a smaller set of results, which not only have both words but have them in order (Sawyer is thankfully not a doctor).
- To exclude terms, add a - before them; -doctor sawyer returns results containing sawyer, but not doctor.
- Performing a Boolean search is also possible; "AND", "OR", and "NOT" are the permitted Boolean terms.
Avoid short or common words
- Obviously, searching solely for the or and is going to return a lot of results.
- Avoiding connectives is a good rule of thumb; jack in the swan is far more confusing to the search engine than jack swan.
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