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.