Help:Searching

The search box by default will directly take you to an article if an exact page name is inputted. It will search all article titles and text for the entry for non-exact matches. It will also make predictive guesses on what page you want as you enter text, clicking on any of the predictive entries will immediately take you to that page.

Search Failures
If your search came back empty, or didn't include the article you were looking for, some common reasons are:
 * Your search did not include all of the site's articles. To search absolutely every article on the site, make sure to select the "Everything" option on the dedicated search page.
 * The word(s) you are searching for are misspelled. Make sure that the spelling exactly the matches the spelling used in-game.
 * Or else, you may wish to browse the site's categories to find the correct spelling. For example, if you know you want information on an item in the Starfield namespace, you could look through Category:Starfield-Items

Boolean Searches
Selecting the boolean search option on the search page allows you to construct the SQL phrase using any of the boolean operators that are recognized by the MATCH function. See the MySQL documentation for complete information on the available operators and what they do.

If you request a boolean search, much less processing is done on your search terms than on a regular search. The only changes made are:
 * If the first word is followed by a colon, it is assumed to be the namespace in which the search should be done.
 * Punctuation and special characters are stripped, but any punctuation recognized by the MATCH function is kept. Therefore, all of the following symbols are kept: '-_+&gt;&lt;~*"

Examples of what can be done using boolean searches:
 * Enter "Vasco" to find pages where Vasco appears as a phrase (the double quotations are required).
 * Enter +solitude -Sarah to find pages including the word "Vasco", but not including the word "Sarah".

Search Context
After completing a search, the wiki will list several lines of text from each matching article to show some of the word matches found in the article, along with the context in which those words appeared. Although these summaries can be useful for a quick view of the articles, they can also be somewhat misleading. The search context and highlighted words are generated completely independently from the original search that was used to find the articles. This can be demonstrated through a search such as "an unexpected" -- the search context will list dozens of words containing the two letters "an", yet in reality "an" was not used to find the matching articles.

Search Order
The articles are listed so that (hopefully) the most useful articles are listed first. Specifically:
 * For title matches, the articles are sorted first according to the length of the title, with the shortest titles listed first. Titles with the same length are sorted according to the numerical index of the article's namespace; in essence, this means that the most recent games are listed first, and that game-related articles are listed before articles in other namespaces.
 * For text matches, the articles are sorted according to their relevance. The relevance is a value computed by the MATCH function that indicates how well the article matches the search string.

Related Links

 * Wikipedia Search Help
 * SFW Namespaces
 * SFW Article Categories