9. Truncation or wildcards*

< BACK | HOME | NEXT PAGE >

The English language gives you many variations of the same word: dog and dogs, give and giving. Many expressions are combination of several words: doghouse. You may be looking for some of these combinations at the same time, normally the singular and plural form of the same noun.

In most search engines and directories, a search for

will give you pages with all words starting with the three letters dog, including dog, dogs, dogged, doggy and dogma. As you can see, if you were looking for dog and dogs, you will be picking up some unwanted hits. Truncation or wildcards works best when the stem is longer and if the stem is not a root of many other common words.

Please note that a lot of search engines "stem" keywords, i.e. they will automatically search for dog if you enter the keyword "dogs" and vice versa.

Note also that Google has introduced a special "tilde"-operator that lets you search for synonyms. If you place the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of a keyword, Google will replace that keyword with a list of words with a similar meaning, thus extending your search.

For instance: to search for food facts as well as nutrition and cooking information, enter the following query: ~food ~facts.

< BACK | HOME | NEXT PAGE >