I had wondered about the =*= when I first saw it in Shally Steckerl’s wonderful Google cheat sheet, too. Looking into it, there is a Google help document, with a copyright date of 2002 that states:
“Google recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors.”
(one copy of it is posted at: http://www.usdoj.gov/google_user_help.html, and also many other places, but apparently no longer on Google)

For some time, I have been using hyphens to substitute for quotation marks in certain situations, e.g.: [minivan 35..-mpg]. Here, I am able to use a number-range search and still “glue” another search term to it, to assure that the number range search result relates to the concept I desire. I can also do this search as [minivan 35..=mph] or [minivan "35.. mph"]. Though, I do see that it is bringing back some varying results–which I’ll have to play with some more. (Sorry, I am a research trainer rather than a recruiter, so my searches may be a bit off-point for this audience.)

So, since you can use the punctuation listed above to “glue” terms together into a phrase, it solves the ~ problem that Glen and Kelly were discussing:

“~administer * linux” negates the related term search usually stimulated by the tilde, but

~administer=*=linux
gives you the wildcard and also retains the related term search. One of you who knows more about recruiting will have to tell me if this is a good result, but it looks like it works to my eye.

What is brilliant about using =*= in training other searchers is that it makes spaces visible, and helps people remember to have them there, when other forms of notating spaces can be confusing.

Glen, thanks for the awesome post!

Essentially I need to search for pages that contain an asterisk (“*”) joined to a word (in particular the phrase “miRNA*”) where the asterisk DOES NOT represent a wild card, but literally the asterisk character.

Does anyone know how to do this?

many many thanks in advance

http://www.codecoffee.com/tipsforlinux/articles/26-1.html