Symptoms

Global search returns wrong results while searching for IPs or MAC addresses even when the search query is put in "quotes". In this case, Global search would swap out ":" colons for spaces " ".

Release

All available releases.

Cause

Working by design

Resolution

This is working by design. We can confirm that this is the OOB platform behavior as well and the way Zing search works. Zing only matches documents that contain the exact words in the exact order you specify. An exact phrase search ignores: stop words, punctuation marks, wildcard characters etc. The following documentation specifies the same. 

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-platform-administration/page/administer/search-administration/concept/c_PhraseSearches.html 

Since the requirement to search for IP addresses makes a lot of sense we created an enhancement request with the text search development team to consider this as an enhancement in the future releases. You may refer the enhancement request FTASK42342. Note that several factors contribute to the overall prioritization of an enhancement request, even ones that we think are great ideas, and not all will necessarily become part of the product: https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0547257.