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?
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 various spellings of words. That's not real helpful to this question, though.
How about Ask? Well, Ask has included clustered search suggestions in its search results, so if you type in the word cycle you'll be invited to expand or narrow your search - and there are a lot of partial word matches in these suggestions.
Bottom line: while most individual-user applications support partial word searches; off the top of my head I know that Microsoft Office definitely does, I haven't found a search engine that specifically supports this kind of partial word search. It seems to be inherently, partially, already included in most search results.
