Rama's Happy Thoughts

A log of all those striving moments.

If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, nothing shall be impossible unto you.

Wednesday, August 10

A new and powerful Google Operator

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 !!

posted at 08:50

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