How can I use a search engine to search for special characters

Question

Google strips most special characters from the text they index so it s not a good tool for many troubleshooting-related tasks  such as finding out what the variable   -  is in perl  or searching for error output that is loaded with special characters   Is there a good way to search for such content on the web   This question is related to the following question  Looking for special characters in Google

User · Accepted Answer

This search engine was made to solve exactly the kind of problem you re having  http   symbolhound com   I am the developer of SymbolHound

User · Answer

Unfortunately  there doesn t appear to be a magic bullet  Bottom line up front   context    Google indeed ignores most punctuation  with the following exceptions    Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings  like   C     or   C     both are names of programming languages   are not ignored  The dollar sign     is used to indicate prices    nikon 400   and   nikon  400   will give different results  The hyphen - is sometimes used as a signal that the two words around it are very strongly connected   Unless there is no space after the - and a space before it  in which case it is a negative sign   The underscore symbol   is not ignored when it connects two words  e g    quick sort      As such  it is not well suited for these types of searchs  Google Code however does have syntax for searching through their code projects  that includes a robust language syntax for dealing with  special characters    If looking at someone else s code could help solve a problem  this may be an option    Unfortunately  this is not a limitation unique to google   You may find that your best successes hinge on providing as much  context  to the problem as possible   If you are searching to find what  - means  providing information about the problem s domain may yield good results     For example  searching  special perl variables  quickly yields your answer in the first entry on the results page

User · Answer

A great search engine for special characters that I recenetly found  amp-what   You can even search by object name  like  arrow    chess   etc

User · Answer

duckduckgo com doesn t ignore special characters  at least if the whole string is between     https   duckduckgo com  q  22 222 23 22

[google-search] How can I use a search engine to search for special characters?

Examples related to google-search