another search oddity

This is not a complaint. (In fact, the board has been responding wonderfully fast today!) I got an unexpected search result and I don’t recall anything like it being mentioned before.

I know the source of Exapno Mapcase’s name, but my memory said he explained it somewhere and I just wanted to find that post. I wanted to search on “MAPKC” (the English letters that look like the Russian letters for “Marx”, more or less). But I made a mistake and searched on “MARKC”.

I found this post which contains the text “Mark**(**c?)”!

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2447714&highlight=markc#post2447714

So it seems parentheses aren’t considered word delimiters and are totally ignored when indexing. Of course, if there had been a space before the “(”, “Mark” would definitely have been recognized as a separate word.

they also ignore ’ so every once in a while i find threads talking about tar in the possesive sense.