Whole word wildcards less likely to timeout than partial word. The query "uss * * * *" (without the quotes) will match untyped topics for all U.S. Navy ships with four or more words in their name.

If you can reduce the set of matches with a word match, you may be able to use partial word wild cards. "bur* ground" will match both "burial ground" and "burying ground" while "*ground" will time out (currently).

Exclusion words are excluded individually, while all keywords in the search phrase are taken together as as a single string.