// Sorry for cross-posting

Hi everyone,

the Advanced Search interface is now available as a default feature on all wikis. That means you, logged-in or not, can carry out advanced searches even if you don’t know any search syntax.

The new feature provides some existing advanced search options in a visual interface. This can help you find pages that contain a particular template, search in page titles, for a specific sequence of characters, and much more. Plus, the way namespaces can be selected has been redesigned. Among other things, you can now select several namespaces with one click, e.g. to search in all talk namespaces. More detailed information is on the project page. [1]

The feature was developed by Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes Team. [2] The idea for it was born in 2016 in workshops with editors, followed by prototypes, several feedback rounds on dewiki and Meta, and finally the beta function, which 43,000 people across all wikis used. During the beta phase, bugs were fixed, the namespace selection was revised, and more search options were added.

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to give feedback (onwiki, in discussions, at the dev summit and more), to test or to translate. A big thank you also goes to the Discovery team at the WMF for their support, by making backend adjustments and implementing a new search parameter for deep category searches.

The development team hopes that the new feature will help you find what you’re looking for more easily. People who prefer to keep the previous search interface can deactivate the new feature in their user preferences. [3]

As always, feedback is welcome on the central talk page. [4]

Johanna for the Technical Wishes team

-- Johanna Strodt Project Manager Community Communications Technical Wishlist, Wikimedia Deutschland [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/AdvancedSearch [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-searchopt... [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help_talk:Extension:AdvancedSearch