Why does "Find a file" search for partial text returns 0 results?

Question

In our new SharePoint 2013 environment, whenever we are looking at a Document Library, we see the new "Find a File" text field. Sometimes we can put in partial data (like for the Project Name field, which is a Single line of text) using a * as a wildcard and results are returned properly. Other times, like for our custom AFE Number field, we get 0 results. We still try using the * as a wild card (both before and after the text we see, and using various combinations of quotations). I can easily see the results in the list, but SharePoint "Find a File" Search does not find it. Any ideas on why this is?

Update: I've been able to produce results if I include the first part of the word in the search, and end it with a *, as opposed to typing in a * followed by the last part of the search term.

Answer 1

SharePoint Search does not support what they call "Suffix Matching", e.g search strings like

*ocument

and

doc*ent

will not work!

You can only do a wildcard search with the prefix matching (ending with the wildcard), like

docum*

From MSDN:

Using words in the free-text KQL query

When you use words in a free-text KQL query, Search in SharePoint 2013 returns results based on exact matches of your words with the terms stored in the full-text index. You can use just a part of a word, from the beginning of the word, by using the wildcard operator (*) to enable prefix matching. In prefix matching, Search in SharePoint 2013 matches results with terms that contain the word followed by zero or more characters. For example, the following KQL queries return content items that contain the terms "federated" and "search":

federated search

federat* search

search fed*

KQL queries don’t support suffix matching.