Special character confuses Search

I am fairly new to php and to the drupal community. So.. Rather than just diving in and making the changes in the repository. I have decided to leave my statement as to what I would do and get feedback from one of the more veteran programers.
What I notice is that when the code to strip punctuation urls and other items in the creation of the index is not duplicated in the search function. Therefore, it is my belief that to resolve this issue requires duplicating the mangling of the items in the search in the same way that it is done in the index. Therefore, the way that I would do it is create a function through which both the search and the index come up with the way in which characters are used.
In the case of multi-lingual and multilingual currently multilingual will find both variances, but multi-lingual cannot find multilingual. In the future what we would have is a more fuzzy search.
comments?

This isn't a but per say, just a missing feature. Re-classifying.

We all know that the search needs work. Steven has taken this up.

Assigning to myself. This has already been fixed in my upcoming patch.

Appears to work in 4.6.1 and CVS.

Robin