Thread:Project:Support desk/Search indexing affected by less-than sign? (2)

I am an end user of a wiki that is not on the Internet. Details: MediaWiki 1.21.1 PHP 5.3.3 MySQL 5.1.47 The list of extensions doesn't seem to include anything for search. (Not Lucene or Sphinx, for example)

I was just wondering whether anyone else sees the same behaviour as me ...

Edit a normal wiki page. Place the following sentence (if I can call it that) on a line by itself:

And then try using MediaWiki's search functionality to search for 'butundeniably'. I get: "There were no results matching the query". I suspect the less-than sign is relevant in this behaviour.

Then change the word "two" to be the corresponding digit "2", resulting in this:

Now the search successfully finds the page.

There is not enough detail currently at Help:Searching to determine whether this behaviour is to be expected. Does anyone else encounter it?

Thanks,