Truncation or Wildcards

When searching for a word, many search engines will automatically search for plurals and other tenses of the word. For other engines, or for more complex searches, truncation or wildcards come to the rescue.

The * (asterisk) is a wildcard used in many search engines. One word can have different tenses or variations. This wildcard can help. Let's assume that you want to search for flag, flags and flagboy. You can search for

flag*

and get results for all three words. This is also called truncation. Unfortunately, you'll also get everything else that starts with flag including flagging and flagpole.

Truncation works best when you are searching for a longer word than flag and when this word isn't as common.

Google also has a tilde (~) feature where if you place the tilde in front of a word, Google will replace that search word with all variations of that word.