This is also a Critical Feature request for us to be able to use Lucene:
Support for queries like "DC240??" which should search for DC240 followed by any two other characters, i.e. ? is a wildcard placeholder for 1 character only.
And queries like "DC*EX" which should search for DC followed by zero to any number of characters then terminated by EX, i.e. * is a 0 to many wildcard.
Also, it would be very usefull to be able to do "*240EX" which would find all tokens ending in 240EX regardless of how many characters lead.
The Utopia for this is to be able to do Regular Expression text searches, but this is too much to ask for :)
i agree. without wildcard the use of the engine is very limited.