Using Search Engines Information Skills Tutorial Unit 1: Web Basics Home | Next Unit | Self-Test | Help  Introduction   Start Here   Unit 1 Contents  Return Topic: Using Truncation in Web Searching Overview Lesson Example Practice Overview The symbol used for truncation in web searching is the asterisk * * * * * * * You can use truncation to broaden a search and find more sites. You can also use it to cover variant spellings or word forms, for instance if you wanted to cover both advertize and advertise you could truncate to adverti*. Top Lesson You might want to find everything on weapons possession. To make sure you did as broad a search as possible, you could use weapon* possess* Top Example This would give you all possible endings to the words weapon and possess which would be: weapons and weaponry as well as weapon possesses, possessed, possessing and possession as well as possess. This would save having to try out each of these words separately. NOTE: the following search engines do not support truncation: Excite, Go, Lycos, Google and Infoseek. Infoseek automatically finds plurals, however. Top Practice Which search will find the most web sites? Put these in order from most to least. a. firearm* suicides b. firearm suicides c. firearm* suicide* Click Here for the answer WARNING: do not truncate too short a stem. For instance car* will find not only CARBINE – but CARPOOL, CARDAMOM and many other unexpected words as well! Unit 1: 10 of 15 Top Return Last Updated: 04/17/2000 Email: KYVL Help Desk Restricted Access KYVL Help Desk: 1-877-740-4357