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It’s because websites interpret those characters differently because of how coding requires using the physical qwerty keyboard. Essentially “>” gets used as a compator operator in programming languages, which means that it’s used as a tool to instructs the computer how to do things. When we need to display the symbol, we use “>” as an “escaped character” which basically means treat it as the symbol, not the instruction set. Often search engines will use a very powerful tool called a regular expression which looks like this for phone numbers: ^(\d{3})\s\d{3}-\d{4}
And each character represents something, ^ means start with. \d means digit { means 3 of whatever’s in front of me }. Breaking apart the search parameters is pretty complex and it needs to happen FAST, so at a certain point the developers just throw away things that can be a security concern like special characters like &^|`"'* specially because they can be used to maliciously attack the search engine.
For other characters: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp
This thread is a dumpster fire, routing infrastructure, solar panel addresses, we are adding this to EVERYTHING WE ALREADY HAVE that is growing exponentially. I work on an L7 support team, regular users are clueless on how this stuff is setup and apparently have strong stupid opinions. Anyone still reading disable ipv4 in your home network and try to roll forward. You will fail, and finite numbers are finite.