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Yesterday I described Search Stemming and how to set it up. I thought I’d have a look at Wildcard searching and discovered (to my shock) SharePoint Search doesn’t have general wildcard searching.

This isn’t news - the normally evangalistic Patrick Tisseghem posted about this a year and a half ago, and plenty of folks have expressed their surprise at this. I can’t say I blame them. There are third party products that given general wildcard searching, but I’ve not see or used any of them, and some of them get mixed reviews.

You might have noticed that I spoke specifically about general wildcard searching. Well, you can do wildcard searching when you’re search for a property of a particular value. For example, a search for Title:Water would return results about water, waterloo, watergate, watering, Muddy Waters, etc.. Perhaps a comparison would be useful to make things clearer.

A normal unstemmed search for Apple:

A Stemmed Search for Apple:

Notice how it returns both Apple and Apples as matching results

A Wildcard search:

Well, that’s just an example really; it doesn’t work. The results are for a normal search for Apple

A Wildcard Property Search:

Here we’re searching for things with a Title that includes Apple and we get a result for an item called Apple.jpg, and also we get a hit on Applegate too (and who wouldn’t like to hit on Christina Applegate?) Clearly ‘Applegate’ is not a stemmed form of ‘Apple’, so even if stemming were turned on (it wasn’t) you wouldn’t expect a match.

So there sort of is some wildcard searching. However, it’s completely unreasonable to expect your typical user to be able to use that - heck, I get confused about some of the fields and field names, so a user doesn’t stand much of a change. Plus, you have to know what field you’re searching over - my example wouldn’t have matched items which had a Keyword column containing Apple, and you can’t really search fields until you stumble on the right one for the results you’re after!

I guess I’m with Patrick on this one - Microsoft, sort it out! Give us general wildcard searching!

Tags: Search