TLDR

Google tends to ignore special characters in my search strings. Is there anything that I can do about it and is it, possibly, happening because Google makes certain assumptions based off of my default text-encoding settings and my location?

I just posted this question over at StackOverflow. I had found a C preprocessor that I'd never seen before. As I should have done, I Googled it and tried to find out further information. I attempted various search terms which were all variations of "C Operator ##" (some times with and some times without the double-quotes.) Google didn't bring back anything of use so I posted my question on SO.

As you can see from the comments, someone mentioned a search string (ironically one which I did try to search) and stated that I could have even hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button and have gotten my answer. The problem is I did search that, and the results that I received were far more basic and even after following the top results and searching the resulting pages, I could find nothing referencing the string "##".

I'm not posting this question to complain but it does provide an empirical example of something I've seen before that really bugs me-- Google often ignores special characters in my search strings and the results are often useless.

As a developer I often need to search for string values containing non-alphanumeric characters. Some characters (like the underscore or hyphen) can be used without trouble. However, other characters (such as the ampersand, carat, tilde and pound sign) are often ignored in my query strings.

Is there a way to prevent this from happening so that I can get meaningful results from Google?

NOTE

I stay logged into Google and I live in the US. I wonder if Google detects some form of text-encoding setting or derives my results based off of certain, localized text-based assumptions. Regardless, I would like to for Google to search for what I give it. Is there anything that I can do to improve my results?