It seems that the wiki search has some issues with finding external link URLs in pages. To be specific I was trying to find external links to the Minecraft Wiki/Gamepedia to replace them with internal or interwiki links. However when searching for "minecraftwiki" or "gamepedia" I don't get any (useful) results. Even searching for "http://www.minecraftwiki.net/" doesn't help.
The search function does search the pages' source, so it should be able to find link targets, even if they are not visible on the final page. According to Help:Searching on MediaWiki.org the search function can only search for whole words, "separated by spaces or other punctuation marks" - but that should mean that every URL element counts as one word, because they are separated by periods... so searching for "minecraftwiki" should work... right?
For some reason it doesn't work though. Does anyone know a way to correctly search for a partial URL, or is that even possible?