Originally Posted by
miamijim
My favorite wild card was the * as you could search mis-spelled items
Campag*
Peug*
*winn
The question mark "?" is also frequently used to match a single letter.
Yep. Plus plurals or other suffixes.
Bike or Bikes (Bike*)
or variations.
Campagnolo or Campy (Camp*) (with the risk of also snagging camping).
Derailleur vs Derailler (Deraill*)
Compound Words?
Future shock vs Futureshok vs Futureshock (Future*)
English vs foreign spellings and variations.
(Italy,Italia,Italian,Italiano) (Ital*)
That isn't quite as useful with Germany (German, Deutsch, Tedesco, etc).
E-Bay has been using an auto-translator in some cases. But, it often makes errors. I think I was seeing some interesting results when looking for headbadges. But, there are a few other things that seem to crop up, especially foreign words incorporated into the English language.