Impact of special characters in title tags?

Wondering if it can hurt a listing to use special characters.

[Shawn Collins]

I just noticed that a well ranked listing on Google employs a title tag that begins with two HTML special characters.

The result is that two bold arrows point at the title words for this listing.

I've never seen this before, and it immediately caught my eye.

Anybody know if this technique can have a negative impact on listings? (It didn't in the example I saw).

[mbennie]

My experience shows it has no effect on traffic. For every browser that reads the tag and catches somebody's eye, there is a browser that can't read the tag and displays it as a question mark.

We tried it on a couple sites a few months ago and saw no increase in traffic at all.

[Shawn Collins]

Sorry if I wasn't clear - I meant, does the use of such characters upset Google and increase the chance that they might delist a site.

[pmac]

>does the use of such characters upset Google and increase the chance that they might delist a site<

I doubt it.

[PCInk]

..but if they suddenly decide that it is spamming and you have used these characters....you decide the risk factor.

[creative craig]

I use &rarr; which is a arrow that points right in HTML in the body of most of my pages and it has not hurt me any way.

I used to have it in the title for a few months then decided to remove it as I did not like the way it looked, it never hurt me though, Google displays the arrow in the snippet from my site just as it would any other text it found on a site.

Craig