Help:Go button

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The Go button appears on all pages in the standard skin, next to the search button. The function of the go button is to display a page directly, instead of first having to select it from the search result page. In other words, it allows you to quickly navigate from page to page without following links.

To view a page, just enter its name and click "Go". The Go button is more complex than it looks. It works as follows:


 * 1) Try to view the page exactly as it is entered, e.g. "Test Page"' and "Test page" are different pages. If there is no match, continue.
 * 2) Try all lower case (with the first letter capitalized), e.g. if you type "TEST PAGE", the exact case match would fail, and "Test Page" would be displayed. If there is no match, continue.
 * 3) Try the capitalized version. If there is no match, continue.
 * 4) Try the all upper case version. If there is no match, continue.
 * 5) Try a case insensitive title search that also matches partial page titles. If there are several matches, priority is as follows: 1) article/module/entry, 2) article/module/entry talk pages, 3) user pages, 4) user talk pages, 5) OpenVistA Wiki pages, 6) OpenVistA Wiki talk pages, 7) image pages, 8) image talk pages. That is, for example, if both a talk page with the title and a normal page exist, the normal page is viewed. If there is no match, continue.
 * 6) *Stopwords are ignored in this title search. (see OpenVistA Wiki: Searching for explanation)
 * 7) *Prefixes like "User:" and "OpenVistA Wiki:" are currently treated as words in the title search, but not in the previous matching routines, where they are treated as proper namespace prefixes.
 * 8) Try a full text search for the entered words and display the search result page as it would be shown if you clicked the "Search" button.

If you use the Go button wisely, it will allow you to quickly jump to your most frequently used pages. It is also a good idea to use it for unambiguous searches — if a direct match fails, it will always fall back to the normal search anyway, and if it succeeds, you are immediately taken where you want to go. In general, the go button generates little server load, and therefore usually remains functional even if the fulltext search is deactivated for performance reasons.


 * MediaWiki User's Guide: The Go button, (2004-03-26, 20:45 UTC). In Meta, a wiki about Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_The_Go_button