Originally posted by olimj
I've seen this advice given as a workaround, but the fact is that an asterisk (*) means the same as "1 or more of any character", not "0 or more". So for instance, using HRC* as a search term will not turn up this post, but will turn up posts containing "HRC," "HRC." "HRC/FMF" etc. This is quite misleading and severely limits search results for 3-letter terms for which there's no other way to search.
It may not be perfect but this is what we have to work with. If there's a better way i'm sure everyone would like to know

HRC* came up with 188 topics
*HRC came up with 148 topics

It's better than nothing