Only for 2007 Guide

Quick Guide

• Full (postfix prefix) wildcard for searching properties
• Refinements not working with special characters

A standard (postfix) wildcard can be used on any search term entered in the Search & Preview search center. To use it, you need to append directly after a given keyword, e.g. manage
If a standard wildcard is not sufficient to find required information, you can use a full (prefix+postfix) wildcard. You can do that only when searching for properties in SharePoint.
The syntax is as follows: ‘Job Title’~%manag%
This will return values like Manager, Executive Management, Project Manager and others that have the substring “manage” in the Job Title property.
Please note that using the full wildcard may cause some performance strains on systems with a large number of properties.

A property value with a special character, such as ampersand (&), apostrophe (‘), or asterisk (*), will cause an error during attempt to refine by that value.
The MOSS index can crawl these special characters, and also can return them when Search & Preview queries for Refiners. Clicking on a Refine By option adds that value to the search. Attempting to search using these special characters will produce an error.
The issue is related the SQL language syntax used by the MOSS index. There is no workaround for the problem at this time.