When using wildcards in a search, I get bad search results

Symptom

• One of our librarians was searching WorldCat Discovery for   (wom?n artist*) and she did not get the results she was expecting.  She also searched   (wom#n artist*) and got equally bad results. 

Applies to

• WorldCat Discovery 

Resolution

When using wildcards in a search, we are limited to only using one wildcard per search.  Using multiple wildcards inside a search can cause a bad search results.  So, to correct the example above, the search results for (wom?n artist) and  (wom#n artist) show results more in line with our expectations.

Additional information

There is more information available about using Wildcards in searches.

Searching WorldCat indexes guidelines and requirements: Stemming.

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