Help:Searching

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Commons’ search engine generally works the same as the search engine on Wikipedia. For help with using the search engine, you can visit the English Wikipedia search help page (which is particularly detailed), or the same help page on other Wikipedias.

Search options on the Commons

intitle: and prefix: and other search options are activated on Commons search. Note especially the file properties search options. Also note that the prefixes are case sensitive; for example, a capital letter I in Incategory:"Cats" will not work.

• Find pages whose title contains fine line: intitle:"fine line"
• Find pages in file space whose title starts with the three letters c o w: prefix:file:cow
• A search for 'shark' videos: shark filetype:video
• A search for 'flower' where the files are 16 bit: flower filebits:16
• A search for 'stars’ where the files are PDFs: stars filemime:pdf
• Find articles that are not in Category:Musicals, but are in Category:1920: incategory:"1920" -incategory:"musicals"
  Note, the minus symbol is part of the prefix; do not insert a space between the minus symbol and the rest of the text.
• Find videos of the Eiffel Tower which are not in Category:Eiffel Tower: "eiffel tower" filetype:video -incategory:"eiffel tower"
  Note, results will include videos from sub-categories of Category:Eiffel Tower.
• Find pages in Help namespace, whose title, text, or media content contains exactly the phrase panorama: help: "panorama"
  You can search in a namespace non searched by default by prepending your keyword with the name of the namespace (function provided by mw:Extension:SearchExtraNS since 2013-02-25).
• Find images copied from Pixabay that do not have included the template {{Pixabay}}, the search is intentionally limited to File namespace: file: incategory:"images from pixabay" -hastemplate:pixabay
  Background: Several technical categories are intended to be only added to a file by inclusion of the appropriate template.

Search using structured data

To search using structured data statements, use the keyword haswbstatement. For example, if you wanted to find all instances of depicts (P180) a Q146, use: haswbstatement:P180=Q146. To find all instances of copyright license (P275) CC0 (Q6938433), use: haswbstatement:P275=Q6938433.

Working search enhancements on the Commons

• Long image and file names in categories can be activated in preferences in the gadget tab
• Intersections of categories can be shown by default gadget Help:FastCCI
• Intersections of categories and subcategories and keywords via Deepcat Gadget ([1])
• Search suggestions and search results can be set to open in new browser tabs: MediaWiki talk:Search-results-new-tab.js
• External search (Google) can also be enabled in the preferences gadget tab

Proposed search enhancements for the Commons

• Commons:Requests for comment/improving search

Other links

• Help:Image searching
  • Special:MediaSearch
• mw:Help:CirrusSearch
• mw:User:Rainman/search internals
• Commons:Editor's index to Commons#Search (COM:EIC#Search) – more search-related entries in the Editor’s index
• en:Help:Interlanguage links – for other languages on the left side pane
• Commons:Categories#Tools – search through categories
• Commons:Bugs#Search – Phabricator requests