Why won't the Marketo search bar respect dashes while filter search bar does?

I feel your pain here, I've run into similar issue with the filter bar in the file tree since Marketo updated to the new UI for the file tree a while back. I think what's going on here is that the search feature uses an older "version" of Marketo and does the querying differently than what's going on in the new UI filter bar -- the matching just isn't as good and I'd venture a guess that it's something that just got overlooked in the development of the new UI where the focus was more on moving the folders around and playing with assets in the file tree. 

From what I can tell, the filter now omits special characters like: " ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ - = + " unless there's an exact match. To test this, I created a new LP called "!@#$%^&*()_+".

Searched For  | Returned:

"!" | True

"!@" | True

"!@#" | True

"@" | False

"$" | False

I'm guessing this is an issue w/ the regex function that runs the filtering just not being as robust as you'd expect with a tool the size  and cost of Marketo. There's an IDEA section of the Community where you can submit ideas for stuff like this and folks can vote the idea up to help get the attention of the Marketo Product team. If you were to create a new idea, link it in this thread and I'd be happy to vote it up, b/c I think the way this is executed is half-baked too.