Help:Wiki Search
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Searching SASSA Wiki
There are two ways to search SASSA:
- Quick search used by entering a term in the search box on the left hand side of the screen. Quick search searches the entire SASSA knowledge base.
- Advanced search accessed from the 'SASSA navigation' bar on the left hand side of the screen or through 'Special pages' in the 'toolbox' at the bottom left hand side.
Advanced searches allow you to specify which Namespaces (and their associated discussion pages) you would like to search. This can be particularly useful for searching only the glossary, analytical techniques, or case studies; select only those areas (and not their talk pages) of SASSA Wiki that you wish to search.
Search Tips
- Avoid short and common words: This is the most likely cause of an unexpected failed search. If your search terms include a words shorter than four letters or common "stop words" such as: "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about", "onto"), then your search will fail without any results. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all pages, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.
Search is case-insensitive
The search facilitiy is case insensitive. Searching for soil, Soil, or SOIL will all give the same results.
Words with special characters
In a search for a word with a special character, such as Roche Moutoneé, it depends whether this é is stored as one character or as the escape code. In the first case one can simply search for Roche Moutonee; in the second case it can only be found by searching for Roche, Moutone, or eacute. Lists of xhtml special character codes can be found online.
Phrase
There is no method for searching for a phrase. Contrary to what you might expect, enclosing phrases in double quotation marks such as "can of tuna" will retrieve all pages containing "of" "tuna" and "can".
Searching limitations and Gotchas
You cannot use regular expressions or wildcards such as ? or *. To search for pages with the words "boat" or "boats" search like this: "boat or boats".
Words in single quotes
If a word appears in a page 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 pages, for which this problem does not arise.
An apostrophe is identical to a single quote, therefore Mu'ammar can be found searching for exactly that (and not otherwise). A word with apostrophe s is an exception in that it can be found also searching for the word without the apostrophe and the s.
Delay in updating the search index
For reasons of efficiency and priority, very recent changes to pages are not always immediately taken into account in searches.
