Thread:Project:Support desk/Search for special characters like/reply

I highly doubt the search engine would search for those characters. It's (or should be) optimized for searching words and word variations, so the most probably thing is that spaces and special characters aren't indexed at all.

If you need that to search special markup for doing text replace or something, you should try to query the database directly, or better, extract the text to a file and search from there if your database is large and you don't want to overload your database server.