I seem to remember that back in the childhood of the Wide Wide World of Web (as Joy calls it), when AltaVista was the search engine one used, there was an option for putting in a "wildcard character" in a search term. I think it was an asterisk, but it may have been an obelisk. The character would mean any other character, or several, to the search engine, so it widened your search. So if you were not sure if it was spelled "asterisk" or "asterix", you could type in "asteri*", and it would find either.
I can't find out how to do this in G00gle, anybody know how?
You can use the * if you like - however, it's not necessary. Search engines use technology called "sounds like", which means they take all the known variants of words and search those, too. That's why I can type in a search term (incorrectly spelled) and Google will return results with the correctly spelled term I was looking for. This does occasionally backfire with very specialistic stuff, but otherwise, it works well.
ReplyDeletePretty much all search engines work on this premise.