For example, if I want to search for <word> , it finds occurences of word, ignoring the < and > symbols. It ignores other symbols as well.
How do I force Google to not ignore these symbols? Putting them in quotes does not do it.
WAG: You may not be able to. Google may not store things like punctuation marks when it tokenizes the text. That may not exist in the database that represents the text being searched.
That’s a pretty good guess, and something I should have thought of. I was recently using lucene.net to implement a search engine, that I think does the same thing.
It searches for some characters
“Character Searching: Google is also the only search engine that searches for some characters. As of Sept. 2003, it would search for the ampersand & and the underscore _ characters by themselves or as part of a character string. In other words, a search on adv_search gets different results than “adv search” and &tc differs from tc. While it would not search # or + in most cases, it does differentiate c#, c++, c+, and c. It does not, however, differentiate c*, c+@, or c±, interpreting c* as c and both c± and c+@ as c+. (These c+ type strings are all various programming languages.) In March 2004, it started searching for the $ when it precedes a number (see more details on number searching below). Other punctuation marks may change the sorting of results. Tomi Häsä reports that searching for I/O works as does searching for sharped musical pitches as in a#, c#, f#, and g#. The &, + and _ also can be used one or more times in the middle or at the end of a character or a word or between characters and words as in a+, a_, C++, page_count, a&b&c, and i&&”