Expand Your Search with Wildcards

If you’re not sure how to spell a word, or if you want to search for all words with
a common root, AltaVista lets you use wildcards to substitute for any missing or
questionable letters. Just use an asterisk (*) to stand in for the letters you don’t
know and AltaVista will search for pages that match all permutations of your
wildcard-enabled keyword.
Let’s look at how this works. The simplest use of the wildcard is when you want
to search for both plural and singular forms of a word. Say you want to search
for either one shoe or multiple shoes. Use the asterisk wildcard like this: shoe*.
AltaVista will return pages that contain either the word “shoe” or the word
“shoes.”
Because the wildcard can stand in for multiple missing letters, you can also use
the wildcard to search for all alternate word forms. Let’s say you want to search
for “table,” “tablet,” and “tabular.” Enter tab* and all these words will be
returned.You can also use the wildcard in the middle of words. For example, if you’re not
sure whether to use the British or the English spelling of the word “color,” enter
col*r; AltaVista will return both “color” and “colour.” (Because the wildcard
stands in for one or more unknown letters, this query also returns the word
“columnar.