That is, I discovered it worked in a sandbox when trying to give this example to you. I guess nothing the forum can help with then Thanks for the answer anyway.

It actually worked in a sandbox aem instance. In our work environment, tons and tons of results that do not contain en/register but only "register"

Hi, in my project we have components with rich text including href links, I am trying to do a search to find links going to a certain locale but it appears as though the slash character causes /jcr:root//*[jcr:contains(., 'en/register')] order by @jcr:score This turns up results containing register ...