One step up from __icontains
The [REGEX and IREGEX](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#iregex) operators were added in Django 1.0 and I'm sure you can think of fancier ways of doing word delimiting and things like that but this was all I needed to make a user-friendly autocomplete search function.
- ORM
- QuerySet