The way non-alphanumeric characters that are not defined as search
characters are treated depends on whether they are considered punctuation
characters or symbols.
- Non-alphanumeric characters considered to be punctuation
are treated as white space. In a multi-word search with the words separated by
punctuation characters, word order is preserved as if it were a phrase search.
The following characters are considered to be punctuation: ! @ # & ( ) – [
{ } ] : ; ', ? / *
- Non-alphanumeric characters
that are considered to be symbols are also treated as white space. However,
unlike punctuation characters, they do not preserve word order in a multi-word
search. If a symbol character is adjacent to a punctuation character, the
symbol character is ignored. That is to say, the combination of the symbol
character and the punctuation character is treated the same as the punctuation
character alone. For example, a search on ice-cream would return the same
results as a phrase search for “ice cream”, while a search for ice~cream would
return the same results as simply searching for ice cream. A search on
ice-~cream would behave the same way as a search on ice-cream. Symbol
characters include the following: ` ~ $ ^ + = < > “
