[Mediawiki-l] Strange behavior of Search when title contains "+" character

[Daniel Barrett]

On our MediaWiki 1.10.1 system (Windows 2003 Server R2, MySql 5, PHP
5.1), we created two articles titled:

COM+ breakage
CON+ breakage

(differing only in the letter "M" vs. "N").  For some reason, if you
search for "COM", the first article does NOT appear in ANY search
results, but if you search for "CON", the second page DOES show up.  (If
you search for "breakage" they both show up.)

We DO have MySQL's minimum word length set to 3 for full-text search,
and have for many months.

Even stranger, the page "COM+ breakage" contains the bare word "COM" in
its body; so regardless of the title, you would THINK the page should be
found by the Search button, no?

What in the world is going on?

We tested this on 2 different MediaWiki installations.

Dan