Help:Searching Commalg

Our goal at the Commutative Algebra/Algebraic Geometry is not only to have a lot of information available, but to have it easily and readily accessible and searchable. In this article, we describe some of the ways we have organized material on the wiki and how you can effectively find what you are looking for.

MediaWiki search
Commalg is powered by MediaWiki 1.11.1, which has an in-built search engine. When you type a term in the search bar in the left margin, this search engine tries to locate the page you are looking for.

MediaWiki search proceeds as follows:


 * It first looks for a page with the exact title that you typed. Note that titles are case-sensitive (except for the first letter), but the search facility checks for different cases as well. So, if you type "Noetherian ring" (quotes added for clarity, and not necessary) you will go directly to the page with that title.
 * If no page with an exact matching title is found, the search facility looks for a page whose title "matches" that of the given page. The matching algorithm may not be very effective, specially if some of the words you type are found in a large number of pages. There is no way of ensuring an exact phrase match for MediaWiki search
 * Beyond this, pages with text matches are also displayed, but again, there is no way of ensuring an exact phrase match.

Google search
You can search this wiki using Google search, but please bear in mind that Google may not have indexed the pages very recently, so recently put pages may not appear on Google search. To search a page using Google search, go to the Google page, type the search query followed by site:commalg.wiki-site.com

For instance, to hunt for "principal ideal domain", type the following in the Google search bar:

"principal ideal domain" site:commalg.wiki-site.com

Google search can do exact phrase matching. We expect that the quality of Google's indexing of the website will improve as time goes on.

Pagelocate
As an alternative to searching, you can use our "pagelocate" feature. This requires a bit of understanding of how the wiki is organized. Most articles on the wiki are either definition articles, which introduce and define terminology, or fact articles, which state some facts/theorems/propositions, and possibly give proofs. There are other classifications of pages as well.

The pagelocate menu that you see on the left side column gives you the opportunity to explore this hierarchical structure. For instance, suppose you are looking for a fact, e.g. the polynomial ring over a Noetherian ring is Noetherian. Since what you're looking for is a fact, begin by clicking the facts/theorems option. You go to a page listing certain fact categories, and now you need to figure out whether what you want, actually belongs to one of these categories.

Even if you aren't clear of what the category headers mean, you can expand them out (using the + signs). The statement that a polynomial ring over a Noetherian ring is Noetherian, would either be a commutative unital ring property implication or a commutative unital ring metaproperty satisfaction. It turns out that in this case the fact is listed as a commutative unital ring metaproperty satisfaction, namely, the property of commutative unital rings satisfying the metaproperty of being closed under the operation of going to the polynomial ring.

An understanding of the property-theoretic paradigm used to organize this wiki can speed up navigation considerably, but even if you don't know how the wiki is organized, it is hoped that a bit of exploration, and possibly a few wrong clicks, will soon lead you to the page you want.