Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Here’s a handy improvement on Google: better wildcard behavior. So queries like

“across from the louvre is *”
“the mona lisa was stolen by *”
“the capital of upper volta is * ”
“hummingbirds eat * calories per day”

tend to provide more useful search results now.

From the Google blog:

If search engines were truly intelligent, you could just pose a question the same way you would ask a person. An alternative is to get the search engine to ‘fill in the blank.’ So instead of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [the parachute was invented by *]. (The blank, or wildcard, search is marked by * - an asterisk.)

There is so much text on the web that this method often works well, but to make it more effective, we’ve improved the way results are found in response to queries containing such blanks. This includes allowing softer pattern matching, if necessary, and promoting results in which the blank filler is relatively more frequent in the context of the query.

via Geeking with Greg

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.