A search of product dimensions using CONTAINSTABLE using the weighted-term of...
ISABOUT("5mil" weight(1.0))
...produces ranked results in which products with "1.5mil" are ranked ahead of those with " 5mil".
Is there a way to get " 5mil" matches (with leading space character) to be ranked ahead of ".5mil" matches (with leading decimal point)?
No, or at least no way was found to improve the noted search using CONTAINSTABLE to produce a search rank distinction between searches of "1.5mil" and "5mil" while searching for "5mil".
What I ended up doing was to add some code that essentially re-ranked the search results according to how close the length of the search results was to the length of the entered search string. The smaller the difference, the better search rank adjustment. This produced reasonably good results for my website.