What are the wildcard options?

A part of Spotler Activate Search' smartness comes from knowing what visitors of your website are searching for before they finish the word they’re typing. For example, if a client has typed in 'footb', Search already knows the client is looking for a football. This functionality is made possible by what we call wildcard options. You find these in the Advanced Site Search settings, under Preferences.

A wildcard essentially tells to look for everything. For example, if you add a wildcard after the search word 'footb', the plugin will look for 'footb- and whatever else comes after that', simplified in our system as 'footb*'. There are several options in Spotler Activate Search that allow you to control where and how wildcards are used.

Wildcard before and after query

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By default, a wildcard is placed after the query, like in the 'football' example above. However, if you want to be able to supplement the query with information before search word as well, you can enable wildcard before and after query. This will turn 'ootb' into 'football' as well. Be cautious when using this option; short queries in particular will come up with many results, potentially clogging the search results, overwhelming visitors.

Wildcard before query

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If you want to enable the wildcard before the query, but disable it after the query, you can turn on the option wildcard before query. This will find 'football' on the search word 'otball', but no longer on 'ootb'. It is generally not advised to turn this option on, as it tends to lead to less favourable results than the default setting.

Wildcard on all words

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Usually, the plugin only places a wildcard after the last word of a multiword search term. For example, 'yell footb' would only supplement after 'footb', but not after 'yell'. Turning on the option “wildcard on all words” changes it so that all words in a search term get complemented. In this example, we would get 'yell*' as well as 'footb*'. This works in conjunction with the other wildcard options, so for wildcard before and after query, you would get '*yell* *footb*' and for wildcard before query you would get '*yell *footb'. Usually, visitors of your website don’t leave a word hanging halfway before they start typing a new word, so turning this option on is not advised. Unless your visitors do use a lot of half words in their sentence.