Search with wildcards?

[translatumgr]

Search engines allowing search with wildcards? For exaple *bert" would yields both "dilbert" and "albert" or manag* would yield "manager", "managing", "management"...

Altavista used to allow this but not anymore. Any known alternatives or running Google APIs?

[Chris_D]

Hi translatumgr,

Welcome to the SEW Forums!

Inktomi also used to offer 'wildcard' search support, but I'm not aware of any major SEs which support a * or ? wildcard search anymore. Search Engines have now moved to a slightly different variant called 'stemming' (i.e. indentifying and indexing the main part of a word to which affixes are added).

For example, Google now features automatic 'stemming' as default behaviour i.e:

Word Variations (Stemming)
Google now uses stemming technology. Thus, when appropriate, it will search not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms. If you search for "pet lemur dietary needs", Google will also search for "pet lemur diet needs", and other related variations of your terms. Any variants of your terms that were searched for will be highlighted in the snippet of text accompanying each result.

http://www.google.com/help/basics.html

Hope that helps

Chris_D

[translatumgr]

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your confirmation of this sad fact! Wildcard searches are quite a useful tool for translators making intelligent guesses at terminology. I guess that technically speaking they could implement support for * or ? wildcard search without abolishing stemming, but apparently they see no reason to do so...