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).
from the 3-gram "a drooling zombie" we generate the query "drooling like a zombie", and from the 3-gram "a mindless zombie" we generate "as mindless as a zombie".