Surprisingly, I haven't really used wishlists much but found some odd results today when I tried.
I was trying to set up an autorecord wishlist that would pick up 2 shows on the food network, namely:
DC Cupcakes
Ace of Cakes
Using TiVoWebPlus, search module, I tried :
*cakes - this rebooted the TiVo - and yes, I did it twice, just to be sure!
cake - this picked up Ace of Cakes, but not DC Cupcakes
So it seems that we can use a trailing *, but not a preceding * - or have I missed something crucial?