You can combine AND, OR, AND NOT by using parentheses. You must put some other search term first. This is useful when you are trying to match a term that may or may not be plural or might use one of several verb tenses. You must have at least four non-wildcard characters in a word before you introduce a wildcard. This is not necessary for plurals because a search on cat will also return results containing the word cats , and a search on cats will return results containing the word cat .
Some search engines support two wildcards.
You can also use multiple wildcards within a single word. Inktomi -powered search engine used by AOL users. Uses listings from the Open Directory . Click here for more information. AltaVista - In terms of pages indexed, AltaVista is one of the largest search engines on the web .