Cannot search using special character

Question

Hi, 
 I noticed that when searching, if you use a special character, the search does not find any results. This seems to only happen if you have a limited number of keywords that you are searching with along with the special character. 
 For instance, searching for "missing motors initialisation?" works: 
 
 "missing initialisation" works: 
 
 "missing initialisation?" does not work:

Kevin Cunningham · Accepted Answer

The question mark is a wildcard character in Lucene which is supported in searches. Probably a good option would be for the platform would be to have an "Allow advance search" option on the searches or global that would enable these options or not. Special characters are escaped in other platform usages of search but not the site search. Normally you would have two options: 1. Escape the ? with \? except the one character that is escaped in site searches is '\' (go figure) so this is not an option. This leaves you with the following based on how well you know your users? Would they want to use the ? as a wildcard? Would they want to do their own groupings (ex. "(community AND intialization) OR missing") or exclude items (-). If not, strip out these characters (or even just the '?') with simple string replacement in the widget before going to search.

Cannot search using special character

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