[ale] OT: Using google search

[Jim Popovitch]

On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 21:47 -0400, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> I'm having issues looking for exact phrases in google.  I want to 
> look at for all the 'brower.toolbar' options for the Mozilla user prefs
> file but I can not get Google to see the '.'.  It keeps removing it and
> breaking the words in too.  Is there any way to tell google to look for 
> exactly what I ask for.  I have this problem many times when I want to
> find information about Perl modules.  Google can ignore the '::'.

>From Google:

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As you've noticed, Google doesn't recognize search terms containing
periods, question marks, the @ sign, and other such characters. These
characters are so common that including them in a search would greatly
slow the delivery of the search results. Additionally, the use of
punctuation on the web is so inconsistent (for example, there's no
obvious way to decide between Mr. and Mr) that including it in the query
often does more harm than good to the relevance of your search results.

While we don't currently offer a way to force Google to recognize all
special characters, we understand that many useful search terms do
contain such characters. We've generated exceptions for terms like C++
and $10, and we're studying ways to enable search terms like C/net.
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Interesting.

-Jim P.