Wikipedia:Look it up
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The easiest way to find information here is to look it up directly. On the left-hand side of your screen under "Random article" in the "navigation" sequence there is a Search box with two buttons under it labeled "Go" and "Search". Just type something into the box, like Bicycle, and press enter or click the Go button. This will take you directly to Wikipedia's article on Bicycle. There you will most likely find answers to every question you ever had about bikes, and quite a few you didn't. If you have any problems, the rest of this article suggests ways to solve them.
Disambiguation
You may type in something like Plaque, that takes you to a list of the many things you could mean by it. This is called a disambiguation page, and it's there to make things easier for you. If it wasn't for that, you'd have to read our minds and know exactly what multiword code we'd thought of for each one.
Redirection
Some things can be called by many names. The Flag of the United States, for instance, could be called the American Flag, the US Flag, or any of a dozen similar things. In this case, if you type any of those in, you will be redirected to the proper place. You're welcome. If instead of being redirected you're taken to a search menu, that means that nobody thought of that way of writing it. In that case, just try another form, or try something related like Flag or USA. Once you have found what you were looking for, consider adding redirect pages for the expressions you tried that didn't turn up anything. Chances are you're not the only one thinking about it this way so you'll make life easier for those after you.
Other search engines
If no such article exists, or if you accidentally press the Search button instead of the Go button, our search engine will do its best to help you along. If that doesn't work for you, you could try an external search engine, such as AltaVista, Google, Windows Live, or Yahoo. For example, on Google, adding a space and the word Wikipedia to the end of a web search query is likely to find relevant Wikipedia pages.
If you still have any questions on searching, see the comprehensive page Wikipedia:Searching.
