Wildcards and Truncation

When you perform a search, the search engine will look for exactly what you type. For example, a search of the singular dog and the plural dogs may provide different results.

A few search engines allow the use of truncation in which a wildcard symbol will stand for a particular character, set of characters, or a whole word. A typical wildcard is the asterisk (*). For example, if you were to perform a search of medic* you would receive references with a variety of endings, including medical, medicine, and medication. Google has recently announced the ability to use a tilde (~) before a word to find its synonyms. The search "library ~instruction" would find synonyms such as help, guide and training.

You best bet may be to use nested ( ) OR searches to find variations: Example: (environment OR environmental OR site remediation) worcester (MA OR Massachusetts)

Command	How	Supported By
Wildcard	*	AltaVista
	~ (before to find variations) or * to replace word	Google. Use * for word replacement: "Assistant Professor of * Relations"; use ~environment for variations

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Last modified: Jun 07, 2005, 17:00 EDT