Rather than use a wildcard * in both positions (ADJ and NOUN, or VERB and NOUN), which gives limited results with a search engine like Google, we generate fully instantiated similes from hypotheses generated via the Google n-grams (Brants & Franz, 2006).
these labels are then propagated to related concepts (e.g., excitement is propagated from rollercoasters to amusement parks) so that the implicit affect of many other concepts can be determined.