I've checked the original files using od and they don't have BOMs.
I'll remove them in the servlet. The overhead is probably small enough unless somebody is doing a massive search. We have a limit anyway to prevent somebody stealing the entire set of data.
I started writing the Python search because the ancient C search had started putting out BOMs. I'm actually mystified because our home Linux box does not add BOMs even though it runs 2.7 but my work one does even though it has the same version. The only difference is Fedora 18 v Fedora 17.
The BOMs are certainly there: <86> <AD><FB>%R 10C0203z-621 %A François-Xavier Le_Bourdonnec 0000000 206 255 373 % R 1 0 C 0 2 0 3 z - J -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
