Unable to search for `::`

[NiedziolkaMichal]

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.

[KartikSoneji]

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]

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.