Can dummy or skeleton characters be used (i.e., blog* = blogs, blogged, blogging)? And, what about typical Boolean operators? (i.e., AND, OR, NOT)
P.S. Have you folks at the Straight Dope tested your search engine lately? Because I am suspicious why it won’t find anything.
After years of using search engines with a great deal of success, I have found that “problems” are almost always due to user incompetence.
IME, reality may differ …
The * character works as a wildcard. blog* = blogs, blogged, blogging as you’d expect. You could have tested this yourself faster than making the post.
Three-letter words are ignored in the index and the search so some * expressions won’t find words you might think they should. e.g. bo* finds bother but not bot.
AND, OR, and NOT are ignored since they’re not considered commands, they’re simply short words to be ignored.
Yes, I could have tested this, but I’m not sure if the searches were working correctly in the first place. Thus, I needed validation from the SD Board as a benchmark, you see.