It looks like Google resumed the support for the wildcard ("*").
"what does mean" returns 13,500 results
"what does * mean" returns 8,260,000 results
"what does * * mean" returns 1,890,000 results
See:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22what+does+mean%22&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22what+does+*+mean%22&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22what+does+*+*+mean%22&btnG=Search
--- Pascal Soucy <pascal.soucy.1@ulaval.ca> wrote:
> Googles does that with all stopwords. If you search for:
>
> what does "the" "the" mean, you'll get the same behavior. Google ignores
> stopwords (and * seems to managed as a stopword).
>
> Both the queries:
>
> what does "*" mean
>
> and
>
> what does "*" "*" mean
>
> results in about the same list of documents. The difference between the two
> occurs in the ranking process. The ranking algorithm likely use term proximity
> so to better match the query as it is written and it keep the position of
> stopwords in the query to do that.
>
> Pascal Soucy
> Coveo
>
> Selon John Milton <lcjohn@ust.hk>, 17.03.2005:
>
> > I just discovered that Google seems to have retained some use of the
> > wildcard for words if you use double quotes with the asterisk. A search
> > for "what does "*" mean" and "what does "*" "*" mean" results MAINLY in
> > any one and two words respectively. If anyone else is using web searches
> > as language learning/teaching resources, this also looks promising:
> > http://www.findforward.com/
> >
> > John Milton
> > Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
Marian
http://www.utdallas.edu/~mgo031000/
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 26 2005 - 05:37:08 MET