Wild About Wildcards

Objective
In this experiment you will test the use of wildcards to maximize the number of results from a search.
Introduction
Wildcards are special characters that are used during a search to find all of the possible variations of a word or search term. A search term can have a wildcard character (*) in any position that is normally a letter. The (*) will act as a substitute for any number of letters and can be used in any position of a word, either at the end or in the middle of the word. For example:
win*
win, wins, winter, window, windows, etc.
win*w
window

You can use wildcards as a strategy to retrieve better information when searching for something on the Internet. In this experiment you will search for a topic using the Yahooligans search engine. By using wildcards in different places, you can test whether using a wildcard will get better results from your search.

Terms, Concepts and Questions to Start Background Research
To do this type of experiment you should know what the following terms mean. Have an adult help you search the Internet, or take you to your local library to find out more!

wildcard
search term
search engine
algorithm

Questions
How do search engines work?
What search terms give the best results?
How can using wildcards get you better results for a search term?

Bibliography
Yahooligans is a search engine just for kids that you will use for this experiment: Yahoo, 2006. "Yahooligans: the Web Guide for Kids." [accessed: 3/10/06] http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/
Here is an excellent tutorial for kids on conducting Internet searches, so take a search lesson from Kids Click: Kuntz, J., 1999. "Kids Click! Worlds of Web Searching," Ramapo Catskill Library System. [accessed: 3/10/06] http://www.rcls.org/wows/
This is a search site built by librarians just for kids. Conduct an Internet search, browse through the different categories, or take a search lesson: Kids Click, 2005. "Web Search for Kids by Librarians," University of California, Berkeley. [accessed: 3/10/06] http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!/
Google is the number one search engine these days. Learn the Google Search basics by reading through this tutorial: Google Help Center, 2006. "The Essentials of Google Search," Google. [accessed: 3/10/06] http://www.google.com/help/basics.html

Materials and Equipment

computer with Internet connection
notebook and pencil
graph paper
printer

Experimental Procedure

You will be using the Yahooligans search site for this experiment, so familiarize yourself with the site before you begin.
Decide on a topic to do your search. Choose something that is specific and that has multiple spellings, like biology (bio, bio sci, biology, biologist, biologists, biological, biological science, biological sciences, biotechnology, etc.).
Choose your search terms and write them in the table. Choose terms with and without wildcards (bio, bio*, biol, biol*, biolog*, biology, etc).
Type each term into the search box of Yahooligans, and click "search" to get your results.
Write the number of "Category Matches" and "Web Site Matches" into your data table.
Continue for each search term you can think of. Do as many different combinations of terms and wildcards that you can think of.
Make two graphs of your data: one for the "Category Matches," and one for the "Web Site Matches." The best type of graph is a bar graph. Draw a scale on the left side of the graph (Y-axis) that represents the number of results. Draw a bar labeled with each search term up to the number of matches.
What was the effect of the wildcard, did it retrieve fewer matches or more matches? Was it better to use the complete spelling of a specific word, or to use a wildcard for retrieving more matches? Do the same strategies work for "Category Matches" and "Web Site Matches," or should you use different strategies? Did you get unexpected or irrelevant results for any of your terms?

Variations

Yahooligans is one site for searching for information, but there are many other databases where wildcards can be useful for finding information. One place where wildcards can be useful if for searching through the computer catalog at the library. Try this experiment at your local library to test the use of wildcards for finding books, magazine and articles on a topic of interest.
Google is a very popular search engine that uses automatic wildcards. That means Google adds a wildcard to your search term without your even knowing so it can find more search results for you. Investigate how Google automatically assigns wildcards to your search term. Are the results ranked higher or lower than your original term? Try misspelling a term on purpose. How does the Google algorithm fix the problem?
Try this experiment with other search engines like Alta Vista, Lycos, Dog Pile, or Web Crawler. Do you get the same results for different search terms with each one? What does this reveal about how search engines are programmed? Do you think the different search engines use the same or different algorithm?
For another experiment on using search engines, try Getting More Out of Less: Google Hits and Search Terms.