Misusing The Asterisk
If you're not alert, it's easy to misuse the asterisk, and end up with lots of irrelevant results. For example, if you're searching for information about alligators as pets you might unthinkingly enter +alligator* +pet*. This will not only retrieve pet and pets, but also petal, petticoat, petition, petunia, Petrarch - well, you get the idea.
All of the major search engines except for Infoseek and Northern Light offer the option of using the asterisk for truncation. (Both Infoseek and Northern Light automatically include some word forms, for example plurals.)
You can't use an asterisk in a phrase that's enclosed with quotation marks in HotBot, Lycos, or Deja News. No metasearch engine that I'm aware of gives you the option of using asterisks.
