How do I search for something like "%4R" and make it include the "%"?

Question

I'm trying to search for a specific encoding that takes the form %4R%6S%72..., yet both Yahoo! and Google always strip out the %, giving me no relevant results at all. Is there a special search engine somewhere that allows symbols to be included in the search, or some advanced method of searching for this through Yahoo! or Google?

Answer 1

There's no way to tell Yahoo or Google to search for a percent sign.

Certain characters, such as %, +, !, ?, etc., are simply not allowed as, or part of, search terms in most search engines. Unless a search engine creates exceptions for common search terms that use them ("c++" and "$10", for example) the search engine treats these characters as word seperators.

Not only are they ignored in a search term, they're not even indexed in the first place.

This is what Google has to say on the matter: http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer... .