Thread:Help talk:CirrusSearch/"Really" exact matches 2/reply (5)

The indices we build for Elasticsearch (the engine behind CirrusSearch) use a Unicode normalizer when storing text for indexing and when processing the query string from the search box. The NFCK normalizer that we use normalizes ligatures like "ﬅ" to their multiletter equivalent ("st" in this case). Unfortunately for your particular use case this means that CirrusSearch can't tell the difference between "ﬅ" and "st" in either your query string or in the documents stored in Elasticsearch. Searching Google for "ﬅ" shows very similar behavior.