Help

Welcome!

You may have ended up here because you typed "help" in the search window, eh? Because the things you had tried hadn't helped, eh? And the suggestion...

"For more information about searching DPWiki, see DPWiki:Searching."

...wasn't very useful, eh?

YEAH! Me TOO!

I found that I had been walking in circles....

Here are 2 things I can tell you which may actually be helpful to you...

1. Searching DPWiki probably won't help you much....

2. reading the shortlist which follows might....

A Simpleton's shortlist on wikiSearch

Best practices for 'Search' are different for wikiSearch, by which I mean finding info in DP Wiki, than for forumSearch, webSearch, and, for WikipediaSearch. Search in Wikipedia reports the # of hits, and ranks them by relevance. wikiSearch does not!

1. UPPER case or lower case does not matter to the search engine. HELP and help and heLP will all bring you here. punctuation matters. Searching for "help" or 'help' does not bring you to this page. maybe the reason your search didnt work was because you searched on a mispelled word. a search term which appears on a page as part of a longer word, will hit.

3. When you search on a given word, the first thing you should notice that it says right there at the top of the page, 'Showing below up to 20 results starting with #1.' That is the default, to show you 20 results... that is not the number of hits. Click on the '500' to get a better idea of how many hits are there, and realize they are not ranked.

4. Although the wikiSearch itself gives this message it appears to be incorrect...

  No page text matches

  Note: unsuccessful searches are often caused by searching for common
  words like "have" and "from", which are not indexed, or by 
  specifying more than one search term (only pages containing all 
  of the search terms will appear in the result).

it appears that multiple terms give you all pages which contain either of the words... please correct me if i am wrong.

5. If you have added a 'search term' and have no results, whereas you had too many before, than remove the latest term you entered into the search, and try again.

6. Too few and too many are both BAD! it is a balancing act... it is a dance!!!

any and all comments welcome...

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--dnorm