Google Tweaks Their Blank-Matching

While Google doesn't offer deliberate stemming in their searching, they do offer a full-word wildcard, which you can get by using an asterisk (*). Thus you can, if you search for "three * mice", find "three red mice," "three blue mice", "three green mice," etc.

Google has recently announced in their blog ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/fill-in-blanks.html/ ) that they have "softer" pattern matching for those full-word wildcard queries.

I don't understand one of the examples in this blog entry. From the entry: "So instead of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [the parachute was invented by *]."

Um, perhaps I'm dim but why not just search for the phrase "the parachute was invented by"? Why do you need a wildcard at the end? Is it because you're not searching for it as a phrase? When I tried both of them the wildcard search zeroed in on one inventor (da Vinci), while the search sans wildcard produced two possible inventors in the first two results.

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