Google Hacks

Using Full-Word Wildcards

Google’s full-word wildcard stands in for any keyword in a query.

Some search engines support a technique called “stemming.” Stemming is adding a wildcard character—usually * (asterisk) but sometimes ? (question mark)—to part of your query, requesting the search engine return variants of that query using the wildcard as a placeholder for the rest of the word at hand. For example, moon* would find: moons, moonlight, moonshot, etc.

Google doesn’t support stemming.

Instead, Google offers the full-word wildcard. While you can’t have a wildcard stand in for part of a word, you can insert a wildcard (Google’s wildcard character is *) into a phrase and have the wildcard act as a substitute for one full word. Searching for "three * mice", therefore, finds: three blind mice, three blue mice, three green mice, etc.

What good is the full-word wildcard? It’s certainly not as useful as stemming, but then again, it’s not as confusing to the beginner. One * is a stand-in for one word; two * signifies two words, and so on. The full-word wildcard comes in handy in the following situations:

• Avoiding the 10 word limit [Hack #5] on Google queries. You’ll most frequently run into these examples when you’re trying to find song lyrics or a quote; plugging the phrase “Fourscore and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent” into Google will search only as far as the word “on,” every word after that will be ignored by Google.

• Checking the frequency of certain ...