Overcoming limitations of search in the Address field

The addition of the ability to use the Address field for searches has been great. There are limitations to it or, I should say, one I know of: it doesn't like certain kinds of punctuation. For example: "Cameroon: 126 Arrested Over Independence Protest" fails for the colon, returning an error message: "The address type is unknown or unsupported." Short of user editing, is there any way in the programming to overcome this kind of limitation?

Very easy! just use search engine keyword before your search string.
for example g for google, w for wikipedia

Originally posted by highstream:

g Cameroon: 126 Arrested Over Independence Protest

+1, current address pattern matching sucks (sorry for being that blunt)

Originally posted by hundredorzero:

Very easy! just use search engine keyword before your search string.

Certainly the safest method. But Opera should improve the way it tries to detect URLs. My wish-list:
Search strings surrounded by quotation marks and search strings containing spaces should ALWAYS be handled by the default search engine and should not be considered as URLs.
Here are - sometimes surprising - results of Opera's current URL sniffing:

Cameroon: 126 Arrested Over Independence Protest          => Error
"Cameroon: 126 Arrested Over Independence Protest"        => Error
Inside Cameroon: 126 Arrested Over Independence Protest   => Google search
"Inside Cameroon: 126 Arrested Over Independence Protest" => Google search
Cameroon:80 Arrested Over Independence Protest            => http://www.cameroon.com/
"Cameroon:80 Arrested Over Independence Protest"          => Error

myopera:80    => http://my.opera.com/community/
"myopera:80"  => Error
my opera:80   => Google search
"my opera:80" => Google search
myopera/      => http://my.opera.com/community/
myopera:      => Error
"http://my.opera.com/community/" => Error

Originally posted by hundredorzero:

Very easy! just use search engine keyword before your search string.

I agree. Since there is such an easy work around for this problem it makes it a very minor issue. If the text exists on a web page, the work around is even easier — select the text, right-click, search with.

"Cameroon: 126 Arrested Over Independence Protest"

Although its always nice to fix even minor issues, there are plenty more important things that need fixing before this.

Originally posted by Pesala:

Although its always nice to fix even minor issues, there are plenty more important things that need fixing before this.

Agreed.

this is not minor.
just make it auto search for any non-resolvable hostname and any hostname that contains spaces.

Originally posted by c69:

this is not minor

You have no clue about bug priorities.
JIRA Issue Priorties

This is a minor loss of functionality with an easy work around.