Wikimedia Foundation
Search results
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition. English Wikipedia is hosted alongside other language editions by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization.
Wikipedia uses a powerful search engine, with a search box on every page. The search box will navigate directly to a given page name upon an exact match. But, you can force it to show you other pages that include your search string by including a tilde character ~ anywhere in the query.
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images.
If you have a specific topic in mind, use Wikipedia's search box. If you don't know exactly what you are looking for or wish to explore broad areas, click on a link in the header menu at the top of this page, or begin your browsing below:
Wikipedia currently has more than sixty-three million articles in more than 300 languages, including 6,826,130 articles in English, with 121,345 active contributors in the past month. Wikipedia's fundamental principles are summarized in its five pillars.
Mar 8, 2022 · If you're looking for a particular topic, name, or phrase, searching the site directly is the way to start. Wikipedia's search function is like consulting the index volume of an encyclopedia, minus the tedium. In the best cases, you are only a few seconds away from answering a query.
This page details how to setup the ability to search Wikipedia from within your Web browser's search box. These browsers support the OpenSearch standard. Some browsers support the Wikipedia search engine plugin by default.
