How to search AU for a string containing “$”?

Question

Today I tried to search for this answer, but the only thing I could remember from it was $_, so I tried to search for this term: https://askubuntu.com/search?q=%24_

To my surprise the result page claimed to search for a single underscore only and didn’t find a single post:

results found containing _

I read the help page and tried to quote the string without any avail, so I got curious:

• searching for $_ → results found containing _
  0 results
• searching for $@ (without single quotes!) → results found containing "$@"
  0 results
• searching for $* → results found containing *
  678,109 results, not necessarily containing either $ or *
• searching for $1 → results found containing 1
  91,291 results, exactly like searching for 1

As neither of those searches give the expected result:

How do I properly search for a string containing $ using the site’s search function?

^{Please do not comment or answer with “Did you try [third-party search engine]?” – I am well aware of google and the like, but if we have a search function it should work properly on its own.}

I found meta.SE: Search terms with dollar signs ($) are ignored, but this solution doesn’t work:

• https://askubuntu.com/search?q="%24_" → results found containing "$_": 0 results
• https://askubuntu.com/search?q=%24_ → results found containing _: 0 results

The odd thing is: It works well if one searches for the string formatted as code! But we all know, not everybody formats a simply thing like $@ as code every times, plus it may appear in a quotation – there has to be a way to search for it!

Answer 1

The quote trick used to work - it was even documented in the help center!

Somewhere along the line, we dropped support for symbol-searches. Yes, that's annoying, but that's how it is. Until such a time as we're able to devote time and resources to improving search, you'll have to rely on 3rd-party search engines for tasks like these.

If this is ever supported again, we'll update the help center page to reflect that.