Fill in the Blanks (*)

What is this Fill in the Blanks?

Sometimes one wants to use a search engine to find a very specific piece

of information rather than to learn about a topic. If search engines were truly

intelligent, you could just pose a question the same way you would ask a

person. An alternative is to get the search engine to 'fill in the blank.' So instead

of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [the

parachute was invented by *]. (The blank, or wildcard, search is marked by * - an

asterisk.)

There is so much text on the web that this method often works well, but

to make it more effective, we've improved the way results are found in

response to queries containing such blanks. This includes allowing softer

pattern matching, if necessary, and promoting results in which the blank filler is

relatively more frequent in the context of the query.

One nice thing about this approach to answering questions is that the

same mechanism can be used in all languages, so the improved blank filling will

work on google.com in your favorite language. It can also be used for

exploratory queries rather than questions as such: try something like [Glasgow

is the * capital of Europe].

Fill in the Blanks (*)

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Fill in the blank (*)

“Add an asterisk within a search as a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard

terms. Use with quotation marks to find variations of that exact phrase or to

remember words in the middle of a phrase.”

Example:

Fill in the Blanks (*)

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