I'm working on a patch to evil where searching for a word with '/' allows me to stop at a partial match. 

For example, given:

"The wor^d I am looking for is abcd".

where '^' represents point, if I type '/' 'abce', 'abc' is highlighted. When I hit RETURN or C-g I want point to go to the beginning of that partial match and not jump back to where my search started.