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Unable to search for :: #94
Description
Summary
Quick search results are correctly showing a few pseudo-elements when :: is typed, but when I click Not seeing what you are searching for? button, 0 matches are found:
URL
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%3A%3A
Expected behavior
It would be great to see all pseudo-elements.
Device
Desktop
Browser
Chrome
Browser version
Stable
Operating system
Windows
Screenshot
No response
Anything else?
No response
Validations
- I have read the Community Participation Guidelines.
- I have verified that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
- I have checked that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion.
Activity
KartikSoneji commentedon Jun 23, 2023
The searching is done by elasticsearch:
https://github.com/mdn/rumba/blob/5409df734847a35c442415f1363c9c1bcb940344/src/api/search.rs#L312-L328
and it looks like elasticsearch ignoring special characters is the default behaviour:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51785404/search-special-characters-with-elasticsearch
Setting a custom search analyser and/or tokenizer seems to be the best way to search for special characters too:
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/specify-analyzer.html#specify-search-query-analyzer
KartikSoneji commentedon Jun 23, 2023
Interestingly, the quick-search box uses a static index of article titles so it does show a list of pseudo elements when searching for
::I think the current behaviour should be changed to ensure the search page returns at least the same results as the quick search bar.
caugner commentedon Jan 21, 2026
This also affects
__(e.g.__Host-).