Better Internet Searching: Punctuation and Symbols in Search

As a 'power search user' using punctuation marks and symbols in your search is almost inevitable. 

Google search allows the following:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en&ref_topic=3180167

You can use some punctuation and symbols to change your search terms. Except for the examples below, most punctuation is ignored. For example, a search for [courtney@dogs.com] is seen by Google as [courtney dogs com]. 

Punctuation and symbols that work in Google search

Symbol What you can use it for
[+] Search for things like blood type [AB+] or for a Google+ page like [+Chrome]
[@] Find social tags like [@google] 
[&] Find strongly connected ideas and phrases like [A&E]
[%] Search for a percent value like [40% of 80]
[$] Indicate prices, like [nikon $400]
[#] Search for trending topics indicated by hashtags like [#lifewithoutgoogle]
[-] Indicate that words around it are strongly connected like [twelve-year-old dog]
[_] Connect two words like [quick_sort]. Your search results will find this pair of words either linked together (quicksort) or connected by an underscore (quick_sort).

In case you are using Bing to search, you can use the following:

http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-in/bing/ff808438.aspx

Symbol	Function
+	Finds webpages that contain all the terms that are preceded by the + symbol. Also allows you to include terms that are usually ignored.
" "	Finds the exact words in a phrase.
()	Finds or excludes webpages that contain a group of words.
AND or &	Finds webpages that contain all the terms or phrases.
NOT or -	Excludes webpages that contain a term or phrase.
OR or|	Finds webpages that contain either of the terms or phrases.

Note

By default, all searches in Bing are AND searches. You must capitalize the NOT and OR operators. Otherwise, Bing will ignore them as stop words, which are commonly occurring words and numbers that are omitted to speed a full-text search. Stop words and all punctuation marks, except for the symbols noted in this topic, are ignored unless they are surrounded by quotation marks or preceded by the + symbol.< Only the first 10 terms are used to get search results. Term grouping and Boolean operators are supported in the following preferred order: parentheses () quotation marks "" NOT + - AND & OR | Because OR is the operator with lowest precedence, enclose OR terms in parentheses when combined with other operators in a search. Some features and functionality described here may not be available in your country or region.