The Side of the 'Net Google won't show you

They say the Universe is 22% Dark Matter. Invisible particles floating out there that are about impossible to locate-- maybe we're just not looking for it the right way. It reminds me of parts of the Internet.Occasionally I will run my head against the wall with a particular Google query when I am looking for a very specific string that involves punctuation. Recently I ran into this when attempting to research the origins of the Netiquette of referring to people in blog post comments as @Brad, or @Jochem. You can search for the term "at sign", but Google completely ignores the actual "@" character. That really puts a damper on your search if the pages you are looking for never used the actual words "at sign". Prior frustrations have come from attempting to locate information concerning negative error numbers. You can Google a number, but you can't Google a negative number. In fact, the dash tells Google you DON'T want it to search for that text. Our mail server once was returning an error code -1, but I finally gave up searching because NOBODY would have written information about the error and referred to it as "negative 1". In fact, it's become a bit of a joke here at work. After a particularly entertaining rant about my inability to Google the @ sign, I got my cube covered with @ signs courtesy of my friend at the end of the row and his label maker. You can't place quotes around your search terms and you can't even escape them. I tell you what-they thought of EVERYTHING! You can't even Google NULL. The url encoded version is %00, but http://www.google.com/search?q=%00 just redirects you to their home page. *sigh* To Google's credit, this is well documented. They point out themselves, that they ignore punctuation characters including "! ? , . ; [ ] @ / # < > ." but I'm not the only person who wishes they didn't. There is a glimmer of hope though. Google Alert claims you can "match the exact case or punctuation of your search term". I guess the moral of the story is If you care about SEO, you shouldn't name your business "..." since most people don't know how to spell "ellipsis" and even if they did, it wouldn't bring up your site anyway!