Are there search engines that allow partial word searches?
Are there search engines that allow partial word searches?About Web Search reader Jaime writes in with a great question: I have not had luck finding a search engine that will allow partial word searches, like anthropo* to search for words like anthropology,anthropophagi, etc., or *cycle for bicycle or tricycle. Is there any search engine that has this capability? Answer: This is a tricky question, because while I couldn’t find any search engine that supported in-text wildcard searches, most search engines do support partial word searches…kind of. Let me show you what I mean by that in Google. Try this search query: ~cycle (that’s a tilde symbol appended to the front of the word). See what I mean? It’s semi-successful. You’ve got results here for motorcycle, cycletrader, cycling, bicycle, and lots of synonyms as well since the tilde (~) sign is Google’s baked-in synonym operator. I couldn’t find anything that would help out specifically in Yahoo, however, Yahoo does enable you to find
