Help:Search

Built in search features of MediaWiki may not be sufficient for some use cases, you might especially be interested in
 * the possibility of searching for semantic properties or doing faceted search (search that can be narrowed down by semantic properties)
 * the possibility of searching inside the contents of uploaded files (e.g. PDF documents)
 * the possibility of including search results outside of your (Semantic) MediaWiki instance (e. g. other websites / wikis or documents residing on a file system)

Semantic search

 * Browsing interfaces provides an overview of built in options of Semantic MediaWiki, most of them are not quite suitable for the occasional user of an Semantic MediaWiki powered site, but more targeted to power users.
 * Semantic search
 * Full-text search
 * Case insensitive search
 * Search feature "SMWSearch" allowing to select pages via the wiki's standard search interface
 * Search feature "SMWElasticSearch" allowing to use Elasticsearch as the standard search backend for semantic content
 * Case insensitive search
 * Search feature "SMWSearch" allowing to select pages via the wiki's standard search interface
 * Search feature "SMWElasticSearch" allowing to use Elasticsearch as the standard search backend for semantic content

Other built-in options
None of these options provide the possibility to include sources from outside of the wiki.
 * provides the
 * provides a different possibility of a faceted search
 * can be used to define query forms. You can customize the fields you want to provide for searching to the users as well as the results to be displayed

External search

 * a search extension, a better option for larger sites, powered by Elasticsearch
 * a search extension, a better option for smaller sites, powered by Lucene Search - Solr
 * a search extension, a better option for smaller sites, powered by Sphinx Search