It’s so easy to enable wildcard searching in 2010 it’s really strange why it wasn’t done by default.

Here’s a list of steps:

• Go to Central Admin/Application Management/Manage Service Applications.
• Click on Search Service Application
• On the left Nav menu, choose and click ‘Federated Locations’
• Click the Search you want to change (like Local Search Results)
• Look for and expand ‘Location Information’
• In the ‘Query Template’ section, you will see ‘{searchTerms}’
• Just add an asterisk after it ‘{searchTerms}*’
• If you want, you can also add an asterisk to the end of the ‘More Results Link Template’ (results.aspx?k={searchTerms}*) – or, use whichever page you’re using in its place
• Click the ‘OK’ button and your good to go!