I believe this change happened fairly recently. When searching for a phrase, the excerpts shown on Special:Search now seem to be exposing the normalised versions (e.g. stripped of all parenthesis, character casing and other variants, presumably accents as well).

Though it doesn't happen consistently. Presumably this is more than a simple character stripping/replacement, but something more finetuned for language. So maybe the recent regression was not it being turned on for excerpts, but the normalisation itself being changed.

User facing issue:

Search for "WisReden" on nl.wikipedia.org.

Results:

1. Gebruiker:Chaemera/monobook.js
   
   'gebruiker erwin blockmsg.js ; importscript 'wikipedia wisreden' ;
   
   130 B (11 woorden) - 21 nov 2007 16:26

2. Gebruiker:Emmelie/monobook.js
   
   'gebruiker warddr qpreview.js ; importscript 'wikipedia wisreden' ; document.write ' ' ; version 1.beta.4 zeus_head_thumb-zanaq
   
   4 kB (563 woorden) - 25 mrt 2008 17:18

3. Gebruiker:Oliphaunt/monobook.js
   
   importscript 'wikipedia wisreden' ; importscript 'en wikipedia wikiproject user scripts scripts add
   
   2 kB (190 woorden) - 23 jul 2008 10:19

Actual page content:

• Gebruiker:Chaemera/monobook.js:

// [[Gebruiker:Erwin/blockmsg.js]]
importScript('Gebruiker:Erwin/blockmsg.js');
importScript('Wikipedia:WisReden');

• excerpt:
  
  'gebruiker erwin blockmsg.js ; importscript 'wikipedia wisreden' ;

Rather weird that it:

• Converted everything to lower case.
• Added a space before the semi-colon.
• Turned the quoted text into one quotation instead of two, but preserved the semi-colon.

As for inconsistency, here is a search for "addOnloadhook" on nl.wikipedia.org:

1. Gebruiker:Aleichem/monobook.js
   
   addonloadhook stats ; document.write ' ' ;

2. Wikipedia:WisReden
   
   location.href.indexOf("action=delete")!=-1) addOnloadHook(WisReden); //

Result #1 has a normalised excerpt, result #3 has original case preserved.

Version: unspecified
Severity: major