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Use Wildcards in a search when you are not sure about the exact spelling of a keyword.

Wildcards allow you to retrieve various words by using the same root (or other common characters) without having to type each possibility as a separate keyword. You can use Wildcards or other related universal characters to indicate the spot in your keyword where the system can substitute any character.

Asterisk Wildcard

You can use an asterisk (*) in the place of a character in your search term to indicate that any number of characters can be substituted in place of the asterisk.

For example,  if you type depreciat* as your search term, your results will include depreciate, depreciating, depreciation, etc.

Note: The bold, italicized text in the previous example shows the location where characters were substituted for the asterisk in the search term.

Question Mark Wildcard

You can use a question mark (?) in the place of a character in your search term to indicate that any character can appear at that specific position in the search term.

For example, if you type advis?r as your search term, your results will include advisor and adviser.

If you include two or more question marks together in your search term, the system makes substitutions based on the number of question marks you included consecutively in your search term.

For example, if you type ??clude as your search term, your results will include exclude, include, and occlude but not preclude (because preclude would have required your search term to be ???clude).

Note: The bold, italicized text in the previous examples shows the location where characters were substituted for the question mark(s) in the search terms.

TIP! If you surround a search expression that includes a wildcard character with quotation marks (in an attempt to perform a phrase search using a Wildcard), the wildcard character will be treated as a space or blank character.

For example, including the asterisk wildcard character (*) in the phrase "nonpublic utilit*" will return no results (even though a search for nonpublic utilit* does find hits - as does a search for "nonpublic utility").

For best results, do not use quotations to surround a search expression including wildcard characters.

See also
Using Search Operators and Boolean connectors in Your Search
Doctype Operators