The use of wildcards is very important. In 1847, an English mathematician, George Boole developed the basic laws and rules for a mathematics which could be applied to problems of deductive logic. This algebraic form bears his name. It is widely used by engineers for logic design. This algebra is very simple as it describes only two states, true and false.
Regular algebra has continuous variables and is thus much more complex.
We can make our web searching hundreds or thousands of times more effective through the use of just a few Boolean operators. AND AND is by far the most important operator. True if either of the words are present. OR bronco would return all documents having the word denver as well as those with the word bronco. This would yield hundreds of thousands of documents in this case.