Search for Articles

One of the important components of a wiki is the ability to search for existing pages. In particular, please search for a page before creating a new page to prevent edit conflicts.

How to Search

1. Enter the search term into the search box beneath the SNPedia wiki logo
2. Press 'return' or click 'Search'.
3. Portions of the pages that contain the search term are shown in the list of results. The search term is highlighted in red.

Difference between "Go" and "Search"

There are two buttons beneath the search box "Go" and "Search". When you click "Go", the SNPedia wiki will attempt to access the page with the page title specified in your search term. If it fails to find the matching page, it will then search all other pages and report all the pages that contain your search term.

Search limitations

Search terms are interpreted literally

You cannot use regular expressions in your search term. However, you can use logical operators such as "and" and "or" in your search. A search term must be 2 characters or longer.

Delay in search index update

The search index is not immediately updated after a page has been changed. If a page is updated just before a search, the search results may not reflect these recent changes.

Search Tips

Search terms should be longer than four letters

Mediawiki does not normally index words of less than four letters, but we have altered it to find strings of at least two characters. You are still usually better off with search terms of four letters or more.

Search terms cannot contain "stop words"

Be as specific as possible when constructing your search term. Avoid common words such as "the", "when", "while", etc. Many common words are considered "stop words". When they are used within a search term, your search will fail to return any results. Short numbers and words that appear in more than 50% of the pages are also considered "stop words".

Search terms are case-insensitive

Searches for "ANNOTATION", "Annotation", and "annotation" will all return the same results.