Sharepoint Wild card property Search

Scenario:
SharePoint has out of box approximately 128 mapped properties and its very easy to add our own properties. One advantage of these properties is refined search or advanced search. One thing which is not documented is wildcard property search.

Sharepoint does support wildcard property search

Notes 1:
Only prefix matching is allowed in property searches, which means that you must have at least the first letter of the property value to complete the search.

Examples:

1. filename:program ( without any quotes )

This will return all the results with items starting with program. i.e. programming.docx , program.xslx, etc . This is kind of stem search

2. filename:"program" ( with quotes )

This will return all the results with items with program. i.e. "program.xslx" only

Note 2:
You can search for multiple property values in one query. The spaces between property:value entries are interpreted as an AND.This is only true if your query contains different properties.

Examples:
1. author:"Sandeep" filetype:docx

Search will returns Word 2007 documents that are authored by Sandeep

Note 3:
You can search for multiple property values in one query. If you use the same property Search Server interprets the space between the property:value entries as an OR.

Examples:
1. author:"Sandeep" author:"Srini"

This query will returns items authored by Sandeep and items authored by Srini.

Note 4:
You can also use wildcard characters in property searches. Wildcard searches include characters, such as “*”, which allows the search engine to substitute any number of characters and “?”, which allows the search engine to substitute any single character.

Prefix matching is also required when you use wildcard characters. This means that you cannot insert wildcard characters in the middle of a property value such as W*ton or at the beginning of a property value such as *ington.

Examples:
1. author:"Sandeep" filetype:doc*

This query will returns documents authored by Sandeep in docx or doc format.