OpenWetWare:Searching

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Google searching OpenWetWare

To do a google search of OpenWetWare, do one of the following

  1. Type your query followed by "site:openwetware.org" in any general google search box.
  2. Type your query in the search box on the left and click search. Scroll to the bottom of the search results page and you will find a google search box for OpenWetWare. Currently this is the simplest way to include google search functionality in OpenWetWare directly. In the future, we hope to convert the search box on the left to a google search. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Search tips and limitations

  • At the moment, two-letter words and short number sequences are not searchable. They will return no hits, despite their presence in titles or full text.
  • Common words found in a file of stopwords are also ignored. This and the previous limitation are set in system variables, and there are instructions on how to change these.
  • Wildcards such as ? and * do not work.
  • To search singular and plural forms of a word, search on: bear or bears.
  • Special characters are tricky. Sometimes using the same letter without the diacritical will work, e.g., Müller-Hill is found by just searching Muller-Hill, but this only works if ü is just one character on the page. If the ü is represented by ü, then the search will not work. Searching for "ller" will work, but not Muller, because the search sees it as Müller-Hill, with the punctuation marks dividing the words. According to Wikimedia, this is a bug that should be fixed. For more on the problem and special characters in the wiki, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching#Words_with_special_characters and MediaWiki User's Guide: Creating special characters. It's not clear how this works for math and symbols and if it is better to use HTML or LaTeX methods of rendering. Searching for symbols such as ° and μ is probably not a common problem.