A wildcard is a character that may be used in a search term to represent one or more other characters. The wildcard character used in Fluid Topics is the asterisk ("*").
When using wildcard search, results are optimal in the following situations:
- The keyword is relatively short when fully expanded.
- For longer keywords, many characters precede the wildcard character.
- It is recommended to use the wildcard search for longer keywords.
- Avoid using the wildcard search for reference numbers as it would affect the results negatively.
- Fluid Topics only triggers wildcard search when an asterisk is present at the end (as the last character) of a keyword. Fluid Topics interprets an asterisk that is at the beginning or in the middle of a word as a whitespace character and does not trigger wildcard search in this case.
- An asterisk by itself is considered a character and does not trigger a wildcard search. Using an asterisk by itself in a query returns documents containing an asterisk.
- Wildcard search does not return synonyms. For example, the query
foodoes not returnsoccereven if an administrator has definedfootballandsocceras synonyms.
Example
Searching for foo* returns results for fool, food, football, football stadium, etc.