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OCLC Support

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

Symptom
  • When searching Discovery using multiple wildcards (Example: wom?n artist* or wom#n artist*), the results are not as expected.
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 expectations.

Additional information

There is more information available about using Wildcards in searches.

Searching WorldCat indexes guidelines and requirements: Stemming.

Page ID
24063