Search Index and hyphens

Question

Hey
We use our UCM environment to store a lot of content that contains hyperlinks. Many of these hyperlinks cotain content that has content like:
http://blah/car-hire/stuff.html
Our users have need to be able to search for parts of the URL's, and we are tripping over how these URL's are indexed. When they are searching for "car-hire" they get results for "car-hire", "car_hire" and "car hire".
I am guessing that this is because hyphen ("-"), undescore ("_") and space (" ") are all treated as separators by the indexer.
Anyone have any suggestions on how we can force the index of hyphened words? I had a play around with the "AdditionalEscapeChars" setting, but I couldn't get it to make any difference.
We are using Version:11gR1-11.1.1.6.0-idcprod1-111219T111403 (Build:7.3.3.183)
Our Search Engine is set as: SearchIndexerEngineName=OracleTextSearch
Cheers,
A

Answer 1

To see if this is an issue with the way the search engine is handling the hyphens, try running this query instead:
http://blah/car{-}hire/stuff.html
The braces tell OTS to treat the "-" as a string literal as opposed to an operator.
If this works, the issue is that the search engine is trying to execute the search EXCLUDING the stuff that comes after "car".  This is somewhat standard search engine functionality, as a hyphen/minus sign is an instruction to "don't include items that contain the phrase following the minus sign."