Microsoft is preparing a technology that will allow users to enter search queries by using only a few characters.

The technology, dubbed ’Wild Thing’, comes out of the Microsoft Research group and was demonstrated on Tuesday at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Road Show at the company’s Mountain View, California office. Wild Thing uses ’wild cards’ to limit the number of characters that users have to enter on a mobile device. The software assumes that a ’space’ or ’asterisk’ can be replaced with any number of random characters.

A search for ’c rice’, for instance, will give ’Condoleezza Rice’ as the top result, and ’ar s*w m’ will result in ’Arnold Schwarzenegger Movies’.

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