The asterisk character * can be used when searching as a 'wild card'.
A wild card tells the search engine to count any combination of characters which appear where the * appears as a match.
This came to light recently when looking for the best way to search for a type of dementia called frontotemporal dementia.
People use a few different terms when referring to this type of dementia, some people use frontal temporal dementia or even the abbreviation FTD
If I searched for front* I would get a match for both frontal and frontotemporal. I would also get matches for other words that start with front, like frontier and front.
The other use of the asterisk is to get around the current limitation of the search engine when it comes to short words or abbreviations.
Putting FTD into the search will return no results, but FTD* will work.
A wild card tells the search engine to count any combination of characters which appear where the * appears as a match.
This came to light recently when looking for the best way to search for a type of dementia called frontotemporal dementia.
People use a few different terms when referring to this type of dementia, some people use frontal temporal dementia or even the abbreviation FTD
If I searched for front* I would get a match for both frontal and frontotemporal. I would also get matches for other words that start with front, like frontier and front.
The other use of the asterisk is to get around the current limitation of the search engine when it comes to short words or abbreviations.
Putting FTD into the search will return no results, but FTD* will work.
