# Symbol Sensitivity in App Search

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/symbol-sensitivity-in-app-search/338266
**Category:** Elastic Search
**Tags:** elastic-app-search
**Created:** [July 13, 2023, 1:16am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/symbol-sensitivity-in-app-search/338266 "2023-07-13T01:16:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![aisyaharifin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@aisyaharifin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/aisyaharifin)
#### Post date: [July 13, 2023, 1:16am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/symbol-sensitivity-in-app-search/338266/1 "2023-07-13T01:16:37Z")

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Hi Elastic,

I want to ask is there any symbol sensitivity when do searching for App Search?

I notice that whenever user want to search something with this " quotation symbol, the quotation represent inch in my case, the filtered results seems to pull everything.

For example,

I want to search 'bull nose 1.90', as from the picture below, its already filter to me the exact 1 value only with all the keywords :

![Screenshot 2023-07-13 at 9.07.08 AM](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/c/1cd1570f28fa3830c5281ecb78b012f4d192e0cc.png)

However, when I add " quotation mark as in inch, because the value results do have the quotation mark, the results became 739 results.  
 ![Screenshot 2023-07-13 at 9.07.15 AM](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/9/9/9908d0559601d2be9b2b94222f48758d96ce8a42.png)

Is it because " mark is sensitive like a wildcard?

I assume as its represent the empty term?

 ![Screenshot 2023-07-13 at 9.09.36 AM](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/e/d/edd7449e90284ec4606b71ffd588e40c47a6fc41.png)

Thank you.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![nfeekery](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/nfeekery/32/117349_2.png) [@nfeekery](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nfeekery)
#### Post date: [July 19, 2023, 3:14pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/symbol-sensitivity-in-app-search/338266/2 "2023-07-19T15:14:45Z")

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Hi Siti, this is expected behaviour from search for two reasons.

1. Lucene treats quotes specially to search for phrase queries. Even though you're only using one double quotation mark, Lucene will still treat the character specially. This probably is why it's making the search results different.
2. As far as I understand, based on the way we tokenize documents, punctuation is not usually searchable anyway (unless you are already using a different tokenizer). You can read more about tokenization [here](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-tokenizers.html#_word_oriented_tokenizers).

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### Author: ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2023, 3:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/symbol-sensitivity-in-app-search/338266/3 "2023-08-16T15:15:40Z")

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