How Google considers accented letters in the results

Same thing with or without it?

[silverbytes]

I searched webmasterworld about the issue. What happens if you put accents in your words (titles) or you don't.
Answers were extremely different: some people say that google don't care and search results are the same for "wídgets" and "widgets".

Others say you better write with accents because in fact google does care about it.

What is the scenario today?

[BadSense]

Google results for wídgets:
20.6 mill

Google results for widgets:
24.3 mill

There you go.

[jomaxx]

That really raises more questions than it answers. The sets of results are almost but not quite identical. Odd, given that the actual number of occurrences of "wídgets" accented in that way is probably zero or close to it.

What I frequently do with keywords that might actually be used for searching is include both the accented and unaccented versions on the page. I don't think it matters so much for Google, but other SE's might require an exact match, so this way I'm covered.

[cheezdoodle]

from my experience it makes a big difference. we do some stuff on my site where we write about people from Spain, and sometimes their names are written with accents and sometimes they aren't. Google spiders them differently from what I saw.

[WebWalla]

I'm not sure that there is a big difference but there certainly is a difference (check out Google searches for "espana" or "españa" and you'll see that the top 10 changes in order and there are more results for españa, even though a search for espana supposedly brings up both versions).

It probably has to do with the way the special characters are internally coded, and since Google's SERPs use unicode, maybe that's the best coding system to use.

When it comes down to people's names, Google might not recognise the word and translate a non-accented character to an accented one. This probably only happens with "recognised" words.