These are some hints about the Search function that appears on every Memory Alpha page.

Search is not case-sensitive

The searches for "visor", "Visor" and "VISOR" all return the same results.

No regular expressions or wildcards

You cannot use regular expressions or wildcards such as ? or *. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it. To search for pages with the words "boat" or "boats" search like this: "boat or boats".

Words with special characters

In a search for a word with a diaeresis, such as Sint Odiliënberg, it depends whether this ë is stored as one character or as "ë". In the first case one can simply search for Odilienberg (or Odiliënberg); in the second case, it can only be found by searching for Odili, euml and/or nberg. This is actually a bug that should be fixed – the entities should be folded into their raw character equivalents so all searches on them are equivalent. See also Help:Special characters at MediaWiki.org. Some page names with these characters, such as PIC: "Võx", have redirects which omit the symbol in question to aid searching.

Words in single quotes

If a word appears in an 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.

Only main namespace is searched by default

The search only applies to the main namespace (those pages without "Memory Alpha:", "Talk:", "User:", etc. in front). The main namespace contains pages, indexes and other content-oriented book pages. To search the other namespaces, check or uncheck the tickboxes in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page. Depending on the browser, a box may still be checked from a previous search, but without being effective any longer. To make sure, uncheck and recheck it.

Redirects can be excluded

Check or uncheck the tickbox "List redirects" in "Search in namespaces" box found at the bottom of a search results page.

The wikitext is searched

The wikitext (source text, what one sees in the edit box) is searched. This distinction is relevant for piped links, for interlanguage links, for special characters (if ê is coded as ê it is found searching for ecirc), etc.

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.