Stemming

Web search engines are getting better at automatically picking up for singular and plural, and simple word variants.

Google offers tilde (~) as an operator to widen a search to look for synonyms and variants. It's not precise but can help.

Google automatically stems most words and looks for others with the same root. A search for dieting elderly cats will pick up dieting and diet, as well as cat and cats. But a search for dietary needs of elderly cats returns only pages with dietary. Google will not say under what conditions it will automatically stem. You can turn stemming off with +, eg. +dieting - will only match on dieting.

Bing automatically searches on "related terms". These seem to be mainly singular and plural forms and might sometimes be a root word. For the query web searching strategies, you'll see at the top of the page the message - "Results are included for web search strategies. Show just the results for web searching strategies." Click on the link to turn this off or use the + sign, eg. +searching.

Exalead has more options.

• Select words starting with on the Advanced Search to work with the stem of a word (never use less than 4 letters and preferrably 5).
• Use + if you want the exact word; eg +investors.
• If you know the stem and want to get the word variants use * at the end of the word - for example, build* = build, builds, builder, building, buildings; diet* = diet, dieting, diets, dietary.

Exercise

Go to Google (www.google.com).

Look for information about socially responsible investing. Use ~ at Google to pick up related terms and variants for the word investing.

Compare that to Exalead (www.exalead.com/search) - use the * to request variants.

Check your search construction against ours on the syntax answer page.

Where to Next?

Sometimes you just want the pages where your word occurs in the title. This is a fielded search.