It is amazing how “gossip” and false rumors spread online!
This post
Google Search Showing Results For Punctuation Marks
points to this post
Google Search, Punctuation Marks and Other Symbols
and viola – big news is made. Did any of the people who re-tweeted it try it out?
Here is a very simple example that shows it doesn’t work.
As the only tweeter user points out in response to my tweet, GrammarGirl (Mignon Fogarty):
Sad clarification on the “Search Google for punctuation” story. You still can’t search for STRINGS that contain punctuation.
It would take TONs of work for Google to start searching for any special characters. By the way, the very first post didn’t say it worked. It said some changes are visible.
Even if you do not really care whether Google searches for commas – it is quite interesting how everyone repeats after each other without checking, and that includes major publications.
Lessons to be learned! 🙂