Search is done through the Search Box in the action bar on top of each page.
You can enter part of a page name or page title into the search box and wait half a second. In most modern browsers you will automatically get a popup with matching page names.
Basically DokuWiki performs logical AND search. That means all the words you put in the query will be used. Search is always case insensitive.
DokuWiki's advanced search query syntaxes are described below. All of the syntaxes can be combined together. In this section, we'll use square brackets [ … ] to represent characters entered in the query.
You can attach a dash - immediately before a keyword to exclude pages that contain this keyword from your search results. For example the query [ dokuwiki -plugin ] will find pages which contain “DokuWiki” but not contain “plugin”.
You can use this syntax - not just for a keyword, but also for a partial matching, a phrase search, a namespace search and a grouping search described below. For example, you can use the query [ -"phrase you want to exclude" ] to exclude exact phrase.
You can perform a partial matching by prefixing and/or suffixing an asterisk * to a keyword. For example, searching for [ wiki ] will only find “wiki”, but searching for [ *wiki ] will also find “DokuWiki” (suffix matching). You can also perform [ doku* ] (prefix matching) and [ *okuwik* ] (partial matching).
Note that * is not a “wildcard”. You can't use it within a keyword, i.e. searching [ doku*iki ] will not find anything for you.
You can search for exact phrases by putting double quotes around a set of words, e.g. [ "installing dokuwiki" ].
You can restrict the search to namespaces. To search pages within a namespace, prefix @ or ns: to the namespace. To not search pages within a namespace, prefix ^ or -ns: to the namespace.
For example, the query [ dokuwiki @wiki ^wiki:docs ] will find pages which contain a word “dokuwiki” and are within “wiki” namespace but not within “wiki:docs” namespace. The query [ dokuwiki ns:wiki -ns:wiki:docs ] will do the same thing.
By default DokuWiki performs a logical AND search, but you can also use a logical OR search by using | or or as a separator of your search terms. For example, the query [ plugin | template ] will find pages which contain either “plugin” or “template” or both. The query [ plugin or template ] will do the same thing. You may use OR as a simple alternative to Partial matching (*), e.g. in finding pages about people with spelling variations as [ Frank | Fränk ].
The OR operator has a lower precedence than the default AND operator. That is, the query [ dokuwiki plugin | template ] can be represented as [ (dokuwiki plugin) | template ], not as [ dokuwiki (plugin | template) ]. Instead, use a grouping syntax as described below.
If you want to restrict your search on a namespace, you have to group your search with “()”, otherwise a search [ plugin | template @plugin] will behave as [ (plugin) | (template @plugin)], i.e. searching for “plugin” OR “template @plugin” over all namespaces, but not as you may intend searching “plugin” OR “template” over the plugin namespace, the latter being correctly expressed as [ (plugin | template) @plugin].
You can group search terms by enclosing terms with parentheses ( … ). Having the highest precedence, parentheses may be used to force precedence.
For example, the query [ dokuwiki -(plugin | @plugin) ] will find pages which contain a word “DokuWiki” but not contain a word “plugin” and also are not within a namespace “plugin”.