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Wikipedia:Advanced source searching

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Essay on editing Wikipedia
This is an essay on notability.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.
icon This page in a nutshell: Advanced source searching can provide more comprehensive search results compared to simpler standard searches.

Advanced source searching can provide more comprehensive and accurate search results compared to simpler standard searches, which can be useful for the assessment and determination of topic notability. Customizing searches to narrow results, using other search engines besides Google, and the general customization of search parameters can often provide several and sometimes many additional reliable sources that are not included in basic searches, such as those using Wikipedia's {{Find sources }} template.

Search parameters

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  • Boolean searches and other custom searches can provide links that are not available in default searches. Simply using quotation marks in searches (e.g. "Search topic") can significantly narrow search results, whereby only results that have the entire term are generated.
  • Customizing searches using your preferred search engine (for instance Google or DuckDuckGo) by simply adding "news" or "news," (both without quotation marks) and then the search term in quotation marks offers results different from the dedicated "news" tab. Quality, quantity and recency vary. It's often necessary to view several pages after the first page of search results when using this technique.
  • Advanced search options in various search engines (like DuckDuckGo or Google) can help to pinpoint coverage about topics.
  • To narrow searches to specific sites, here's something that works in DuckDuckGo and Google searches (be sure to include the topic in quotation marks): "Search topic" site:www.siteexample.com This generates results only from the specified site.
  • To search within a top-level domain or generic top-level domain, a "site" parameter can be added. For example: "Search topic" site:*.ro lists websites under the .ro generic top-level domain.
  • Omitting results by adding a minus (-) sign and url addresses for unwanted sites can result in higher-relevance hits (or at least higher relevance hits per Wikipedia's notability standards, to omit sites that aren't valid for demonstrating topic notability) – e.g. "Search topic" -siteexample.com.

Advanced search options

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Niche search engines

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Custom search engines

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General-purpose Google Programmable Search Engines
Name Project Page or Owner Queries/day Last update Lowest-rated perennial source
GRel Source Engine User:Aaron Liu 9 August 2025 Generally reliable Generally reliable
Reliable Source Engine [a] project page 7 May 2025 Generally reliable Generally reliable
Wikipedia Reference Search project page 30 July 2024 No consensus no consensus
Reliable perennial sources User:Barkeep49 2020? Wikipedia:QUESTIONABLE [1] Generally unreliable
Reliable sources search engine User:A Quest For Knowledge ? Wikipedia:QUESTIONABLE Generally unreliable
{{Search for expanded }} template
Advanced search for:
"Search topic"
Generic custom search engines
Reliable Source engine [2]
Niche custom search engines

Video games [3]

In books/documents
Google Books
Internet Archive · WorldCat
In the news
Google News: recent · archives
Free English newspaper archives
In academic/legal journals
and reference works
Google Scholar: academic · legal

The Wikipedia Library
Oxford Reference · JSTOR
PUBMED Central

World Wide Web pages
Google · Bing · DuckDuckGo
Images (free)
Google · Flickr

Indian newspapers searches

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Wikiproject custom search engines

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  • Some WikiProjects have their own custom Google search, to sort through websites they have agreed to be reliable sources. This often shows ample results that a Google news archive search does not. See examples below.

Scholarly works

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  • Internet Archive Scholar - The fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive.
  • Semantic Scholar - Semantic Scholar is an artificial intelligence–powered research tool for scientific literature.
  • OpenAlex - OpenAlex is a bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible in open access mode.

More resources

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By topic

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You can improve this article by using ideal sources as references to support medical and health content added to this article. These sources are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) . Medical text books, governmental health agencies and medical review articles are excellent sources. Here are links to some sources of information about Advanced source searching.

Source searching

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See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ News-sources only - narrower search results with some filtering-out of opinion and other pages that are not as useful or reliable.

References

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Philosophy
Article construction
Writing article content
Removing or
deleting content
The basics
Philosophy
Dos
Don'ts
WikiRelations
About essays
Policies and guidelines

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