Wikipedia:Tip of the day/July 23

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia industrial-powered search

Do you need more search power? You wish to leave no stone unturned?

AutoWikiBrowser includes a tool called Database Scanner that searches Wikipedia offline from your hard disk. It returns a simple unformatted single-column list of pages that match your criteria.

It is in AWB's tool menu. To use the scanner, first download the Wikipedia Database and unzip it. No login is required to use the tool, so you do not need to be a registered AWB user. Database Scanner supports regular expressions (regex) and it supports two search fields that it uses at the same time: one for searching titles and one for searching page content.

It may take over 20 minutes for a search to finish, so the best approach may be to change to another window and forget about the search for a while, though it can be fun (and enlightening) to watch the titles as they appear on the list (and look some up while you are waiting). Database Scanner also has a filter feature to further refine the list of results.