When using the PHP.net website, there is even no need to get to a search box to access the content you would like to see quickly. You can use short PHP.net URLs to access pages directly.
Note, that these shortcuts are expected to work on all mirror sites, not just at the main site. If you find that some of these shortcuts are not working on your mirror site, please report them as a "PHP.net Website Problem" at http://bugs.php.net/.
There are currently three types of URLs you can use this way.
If you write in a PHP.net URL (e.g. http://ie1.php.net/get-involved, first this URL is matched against the PHP.net pages. If there is a page named get-involved.php, then you'll get that page immediately. This type of shortcut makes easy to type in a link in an IRC conversation or mailing list message. If the script finds no page with this name, it tries to find a manual page.
If your URL can't be matched with a page name, a manual page is searched for your query. This is the case for the http://ie1.php.net/preg_match URL. The following pages are searched for in the manual:
Since there are several manual pages that could potentially match the query (extension, class, function name..) you are encouraged to use their prefix/suffix:
This kind of URL will bring up the manual page in your preferred language. You can always override this setting by explicitly providing the language you want to get to. You can embed the language in the URL before the manual search term. http://ie1.php.net/hu/sort will bring up the Hungarian manual page for sort() for example.
At last, if there is no PHP page, and there is no manual page matching your query, a search is issued on the site with the query you typed into the URL. An example of this kind of URL is http://ie1.php.net/search_for_this. The exact behaviour of this search is affected by your own My PHP.net settings.
We also have shortcut aliases to access some resources more quickly, and with a nice URL. Aliases are translated to their relevant shortcuts before the first step (PHP page search) mentioned above. Some examples of shortcut aliases: http://ie1.php.net/whatisphp, http://ie1.php.net/php4news. The latter is an external page alias, as it points to a file on the Git server, containing information about changes in PHP. There are also some convenient aliases(e.g. http://ie1.php.net/de/phpversion which displays the German manual page for the phpversion() function.