Google - Something Strange - Decimal Characters and HTML
Posted by Venkatakrishnan J on January 24, 2008
I noticed something very strange today(atleast strange for me). While i was looking at some XML WebMessage code in BI EE, i noticed the usage of some decimal HTML codes like 
. Well i thought i would search for them in Google to find out what exact HTML characters they point to. I know for a fact that they are actual decimal character references for special characters in HTML. But when i wanted to search for them in Google, all i got was their actual characters. If you are not sure what i mean look at the screenshots below or enter in your Google search. All i wanted was to list all the pages that had reference to this decimal character .
But all i got was an apostrophe i.e the actual HTML character to which this decimal character reference pointed to. I tried this in other search engines and they dont seem to have a problem displaying these special characters. Is this expected? Well, if you are wondering how to search for these characters then just search for them without their semi-colons. This website here has more details on these special characters
January 25, 2008 at 8:08 am
Hi Venkatakrishnan J,
For added weirdness try mis-typing the code into google ie “&,;” and I think you will get the pages you originally wanted. Must be google thing.
Ed
January 25, 2008 at 9:54 am
Ed,
Yes thats true and for that matter if you remove any of the characters from & you would get the result. But my question was why? Is that a blatant miss which is documented somewhere in Google or is it just me who has noticed this?
-Venkat