It appears there are better wild card features for "fulltext" search than for vB, although I don't know all the codes for either. I do know that some of the codes I use on some vB sites will not work on our site.

I've asked vB for a full list of the codes... they have responded that they are gathering them up. Seems like they would publish these in a pop-up on the search page. It seems to have been available this way in the older versions as far back as 3.0.