Full-text using 'contains'

Question

Suppose I have a table, under full-text indexing, with column data containing values 'law','lawson','byelaw'. I do a select using CONTAINS '"*law*"'. The first two records are returned but not the one with 'byelaw'.
I suspect the leading '*' is ignored when using 'contains'. Is this by design? I find this hard to believe.
Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Its by design. Rumor has it the prefix based wildcards are being planned for the next version of sql server.

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Answer 2

Well I won't hold my breath. If Microsoft haven't done it after four versions of SQL Server I can't see them doing it now.

I find it amazing (and extremely disappointing) that matches found using an ordinary '&like%' cannot be found using full-text indexing.