As long as the words were on the same page, they would be counted as a match. However, that leads to another problem. The order of the words wouldn't matter, just the proximity. This is a great technique for finding all pages about a particular person. A wildcard can represent any other card in the deck.
Wildcard capabilities exist in search engines also.
For those of you that have ever used DOS, this may be a little familiar. The asterisk can represent any number of alphabetic or numeric characters and the question mark can only represent one. I know that sounded confusing, so let me include an example. Three scenarios exist where wildcards come in handy. Of course not.