When I talked of the quote being ungoogleable, I wasn’t talking of the technical difficulty of composing the query in google. I was talking of the fact that there are so many versions of the quote available. Nonetheless, a helpful reader Ramesh R has given me the information that google accepts the wildcard *. So you can search for “What do they know of * who only * know” Neat no?

Here is his mail with some interesting historical information:

This is in reference to your post on the Google search difficulty with “what do they know about X…” … Anyway, such a phrase is still searchable by Google if you use stop words. Previously Google ignored certain words like the, what, who… (terming them as stop word) and ignoring them in the search. The consequence was that you could use stop words as a placeholder for any words and do proximity searches. Later on Google removed the stop words but they left the wild-card character * which works the same way. So you can search for that quote by using “what do they know of * who only * know”. Whether you trace the quote with this is a different issue but you might want to refer a small search tutorial that we use at http://forum.quoteland.com/1/OpenTopic?a=tpc&s=586192041&f=45 11947895&m=5661977023&r=8881961675 …

Thanks Ramesh.