Interesting, that also bring up the question how those posts with homographs are handled, because theymos did some changes, and they are displayed without the homographs in the threads, but you are still able to search based on homographs an they came up in the results as homographs. I don't think ppl still do that as there's no point anymore, I'll check later and come with input.
I'm not sure what you mean, since
homographs are just normal words (unless there's other meaning I don't know). And (English) words are treated as words.
On the other hand, basically any proper web crawler engine will ignore (treat as space) all kinds punctuation to avoid problems. (Also usually treats multiple spaces as one, but that doesn't matter much here).
I guessed that this one may do the same, made a test, it worked out, hence that post of mine.