Autocomplete suggestions in reference fields using a STARTSWITH search by default. Using an asterisk (*) before your search term turns it into a CONTAINS search.

You can use double asterisks (**) & it shows the first 15 records in the table sorted alphabetically by the table’s display value column if not otherwise specified by the ref_ac_order_by attribute. The number of records can be controlled through the glide.xmlhttp.max_choices property. This also affects the number of recent selections shown to the user in the field or variable.