Help:Searching

The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995

The search box on the left-hand side of every UESP page has three buttons:

Go: To jump straight to the article with the provided name
Search: To search all UESP articles for the provided text
?: Help, brings you to this page

You can also access the search function at Special:Search.

1 Basic Searching
2 Go Function
3 Search Function
4 Search Preferences
5 Other Ways to Search
6 Related Links

[edit] Basic Searching

Search all Games	To search for content in all Elder Scrolls games simply enter the desired search terms. For example: vampire cure -- Search for vampire cures from all games king lysandus -- Find all instances of King Lysandus in any game
Search Within a Specific Game	To search within a single game enter the game name followed by colon and then your desired search terms. oblivion:vampire -- Look for information on Oblivion vampires daggerfall:main quest -- Get main quest information for only Daggerfall
Go and Search	The Go function will jump directly to a page with a matching title if any exists. Otherwise it functions exactly like the Search function by displaying the entire list of page content matches. altmer (Go) -- Jump to the best page title matching Altmer. This will depend on your current namespace (see Go Function below) and could be Tamriel:Altmer, Morrowind:Altmer, or Oblivion:Altmer. altmer (Search) -- Display all title and page content matches for Altmer.

[edit] Go Function

Entering some text into the search box then clicking the Go button will take you straight to the requested article, if it exists. The Go function is context-sensitive, so if you are reading an Oblivion-related article, it will take you to any existing Oblivion article; if you are reading a Morrowind page, you will be taken to any existing Morrowind article. If the page you looked for does not exist, it will instead do a standard search on the text, and you may be given the option to create the page.

Go tries to look for any article (or redirect page) that is likely to match the text you entered. It is not case-sensitive, it checks for plural/singular forms, and it checks for names with and without articles such as "the" or "a". In other words, entering "Animals", "animal", "an animal", or "anIMAL" would all take you to an article named "Animals" (assuming there is an article with that name).

Go takes advantage of UESPWiki's namespaces to try to identify the article that you are looking for. This means that entering a term such as "Altmer" will take you to the article that is most relevant, based upon the game you are currently reading about and your defined search preferences. For example:

If you start on an Oblivion or Shivering Isles page and go to Altmer, you will end up at Oblivion:Altmer.
If you start on a Morrowind, Tribunal, or Bloodmoon page and go to Altmer, you will end up at Morrowind:Altmer.
If you start on a Tamriel page and to go Altmer, you will end up at Tamriel:Altmer.
If you start at this page and go to Altmer, you will be taken to a search page so that you can choose which Altmer page you are interested in.

If you have customized your search preferences, then the Go button will only look in the current namespace and your selected namespaces. In other words, if you have unchecked "Morrowind" in your search preferences, then go to Altmer from this page will take you straight to the Oblivion:Altmer page, because based on your preferences you are not interested in the Morrowind:Altmer page.

If the text you entered does not match an article, you will be given the option to create that article in the current namespace. This option is only available if you started from one of UESPWiki's "gamespaces", i.e. one of the namespaces used to organize game-related information. Otherwise, the page will suggest that you should choose an appropriate game and start again.

If you want to override the go function's namespace selection, you can always specify the correct namespace. For example, to go the Tamriel article on Altmer, you can type "Tamriel:Altmer" into the search box and hit go. This can also be used if you need to create an article in a special namespace. For example, you could type "Help:My New Page" to create a page with that name in the Help namespace. If you need to create a page in the main namespace, add a single colon in the front of the name, e.g., ":My New Page".

[edit] Search Function

The search function never takes you directly to an article. Instead, it does a comprehensive search of all the articles on the site and provides you with a list of every article that contains your text, either in its title or in the body of the article. You will end up at the same search page if you use the go function but "go" is unable to find any matching articles.

Search only shows matches that contain every word you enter in the search box. However, it will completely ignore certain very common words ("the", "a", "from", "have", "is", etc.). The order of the words does not matter, and they will not necessarily be adjacent to each other in the matching text. Search will also match words that are embedded in longer words. For example, a search on "black soul gem" will not just match pages with that phrase, but will also match a page that contains "blackwood" in one sentence and "soulgems" in another.

By default the search will check all the site's game-related namespaces (but not the discussion pages) for matches. It will show any redirect pages that match. There are a few possible ways to fine-tune the search:

You can change your user preferences to change the default list of namespaces that are searched
On the search page, you can use the box at the bottom of the page to alter the options for the current search
You can add a namespace when using the search box to search just one namespace. For example, typing "Oblivion:vampire" in the search box will do a search for the word "vampire" within Oblivion-related pages only. For this to work, you must include the colon (":"), and the namespace (game name) has to be the first word. In other words, searches "Oblivion vampire" or "vampire oblivion" will not recognize "oblivion" as a namespace and will probably not give you the results that you are looking for.

[edit] Search Preferences

If you are a logged-in user, you can permanently modify your search preferences so that the search engine only looks through games that you are interested in. These preferences will be taken into account by both the Go and Search functions.

To access the preferences, click on the "my preferences" option at the top of every page (next to the links to your user page and talk page). Under the "Search" tab you will find a list of all the namespaces that exist on the site. Click those that you are interested in, and unclick those you are not interested in. For example, if the only Elder Scrolls game you own is Morrowind GOTY edition, you may want to only click "Tamriel", "Morrowind", "Tribunal", and "Bloodmoon". These options can be overridden for individual searches, as detailed in the previous sections.

[edit] Other Ways to Search

The go and search features work best if you know the correct spelling of the names or items you are looking for. If you are unsure of the spelling, you may have more success browsing the site's categories. For example, if you know you want information on an Oblivion quest about a character with a name like "Adarji", you could look through the Oblivion-Quests or Oblivion-Quests-Thieves Guild categories to see that the quest's name is Ahdarji's Heirloom. Or you could also check the Oblivion-NPCs or Oblivion-Khajiit categories to find a link to the NPC Ahdarji.

External search engines have different algorithms for locating the most relevant article, and may be useful especially when the UESP search engine finds a large number of possible pages: