# another search oddity **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [August 7, 2003, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-search-oddity/193483 "2003-08-07T01:37:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-search-oddity/193483/1 "2003-08-07T01:37:34Z")
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](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. ---
**Author:** ![Tars\_Tarkas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Tars\_Tarkas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tars_Tarkas)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 6:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/another-search-oddity/193483/2 "2003-08-07T06:22:11Z")
they also ignore ’ so every once in a while i find threads talking about tar in the possesive sense.