You havne't told us anything about how you have the anslysis configured for the fileds you are using -- and those details probably contain the specifics of your problem.
once you've escaped hte colon so that eismax no longer recognizes it as "search this specific user field" syntax, any other questions about what the final query for that clauses windsup being, and what it does or doesn't match are entirely depending on your analyis. When I use the Solr 4.3.1 example configs, and index a document like this... $ java -Ddata=args -jar post.jar '<add><doc><field name="id">HOSS</field><field name="title">12:34</field><field name="cat">12:34</field></doc></add>' Then the following query will find it... http://localhost:8983/solr/select?debugQuery=true&defType=edismax&qf=title&q=12\:34 ...and the parsed query, because of the fieldType & analyzier for the title field, looks like... (+DisjunctionMaxQuery(((title:12 title:34))))/no_coord This query will also find it... http://localhost:8983/solr/select?debugQuery=true&defType=edismax&qf=cat&q=56\:78 (+DisjunctionMaxQuery((cat:56:78)))/no_coord As will this one... http://localhost:8983/solr/select?debugQuery=true&defType=edismax&qf=sku&q=99\:00 (+DisjunctionMaxQuery((sku:9900)))/no_coord As does combining them all together... http://localhost:8983/solr/select?debugQuery=true&q.op=AND&defType=edismax&qf=sku+title+cat&q=12\:34+56\:78+99\:00 Note that if you use to "uf" option to tighten down which field names edismax allows with the ":" syntax, you don't even have to escape it... http://localhost:8983/solr/select?debugQuery=true&q.op=AND&defType=edismax&uf=-*&qf=sku+title+cat&q=12:34+56:78+99:00 -Hoss
