Some search engines allow the use of wild cards. A wild card is a character which can be appended to the root of a word so that you can search for all possible endings. For instance, you may be looking for information on the harmful effects of smoking. Documents which contain the following words may all be useful to your search: smoke, smoking, smokers, smoked, smokes. If a search engine allows wild cards, you can enter "smok*". The asterisk is the wild card and documents which contain words that start with "smok" will be returned. Try it now. Go to each search engine and enter a word that has more than one possible ending. Then search again using the root of the word plus a wild card. Compare the results.

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