Using Wildcards

You can use wildcard characters to expand your search or if you are not sure of the spelling of your search term:

Asterisks (*) substitute for a string of characters of any length - at the begining or the end of the string

Question marks (?) substitute for a single character

Once you have found the correct form of the word for your search, you can submit a new query to limit the search to the documents containing that form of the word.

Asterisk

The asterisk is useful for matching terms with the same root or prefix. For example:

This query finds documents that match trichloro, as well as documents that match terms like 1,1,1-trichloroethane and trichloroethylene.

This query finds documents that match genicity, as well as documents that match terms like carcinogenicity, mutagenicity and teratogenicity.

Question Mark

The question mark is useful to substitute for characters in a particular position in a term. For example, if you are searching for a document referring to "centre" and what to retrieve both forms of the word centre or center, use this query:

Another example is:

The search engine finds documents that contain either absorption or adsorption.