Carolynn,
I wrote an expansive document on "power searching" involving wildcards, operators, and even arithmetic operators like "<" and ">".
I can't post documents, though, and do not want to publicly post the document and link it here.
If you are on LinkedIn (or something) can you let me know how to reach you there? We can exchange email addresses at that point and I can send you the document. It might be of help to you...
Thanks,
Joe Kaufman