The star (*), popularized by microsoft as
wildcard search operator, is now at Google. And it works
amazingly well and
brilliantly simple as a fill-in-the blank query, like, [
burgers and * make *].
Check out this nice query, [
flower * classes] and it fills in the blanks like, flower
arranging classes, flower
designing classes, flower
arrangement courses etc, (get the drift?) and also it does search for variants like
courses,
course, and
lessons.
Notice that it doesn't do stemming on
flower. But lo and behold, the synonym tilde operator. Try [
~flower * classes] and it does stemming on flower like
flowering and
floral too.
Wow. It is truly beyond just text matching now. It's a powerful understanding the meaning of the word search. Try it out !!