"When I search for certain items, it seems that the search bar brings up strange results. For instance, searching "Doctor Who (" turns the "(" into an "a" ([http://i712.photobucket.com/albums/ww122/fifteenstep/wikisearchproblem.png an example here in this segment of a screen cap]) and a search for "Doctor Who h" turns the "h" into an ":" (i'm using Doctor Who examples because that's what I was indeed looking for when I discovered this). I get the bug with other searches (like, "Star Trek o") or when I search for a single word and a space (like "Star " turns "Starting Pitcher" into "Star ing Pitcher" and "Starbucks" into "Star ucks" and "Life " turns "Life Imprisonment" into "Lifebimprisonment"). In fact, I just noticed this now, but searching for "life" then two spaces turns the searches into "Lifebo+(rest of search result phrase beginning with "Life"), three spaces turns the search to "Lifeboa+(rest of search result phrase beginning with "Life"), eg "Lifeboaimprisonment", and so on until "Life+17 spaces" full reveals "Lifeboat (shipboard)" over the search results. I get the same thing if I search words like "time", "star", "rose" and "royal" and a bunch of spaces or any spaces (even sometimes one)."
This is confirmed with Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 3.3.6 and 3.3.7.
Proactively assigning this to adam, who implemented this as far as I know.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Vector_Search_Problem