Matt Cutts' Answer about Special Characters: "I Don't Know"

[tedster]

How refreshing. Matt chose to handle a question "How does Google handle ligatures, soft-hyphens, interpuncts and hyphenation" on the video blog. And he answered with "I don't know". [youtube.com...]

He goes on to explain that if he doesn't know, that should be a warning that we'd better test whatever we do in the area of typographic correctness before going all the way with it.

[Robert Charlton]

Two references here, more to spur further inquiry than to suggest definitive answers....

In the June 18 WebProNews video interview with Bruce Clay about Caffeine... [videos.webpronews.com...] ...I remember that Bruce had made a point that Caffeine is UTF compatible. Quote from the background material on WPN about the video...

Although Google has not officially announced it, users can now buy Unicode characters in urls and the search engine supports it.

And, from unicode.org FAQ...

Ligatures, Digraphs, Presentation Forms vs. Plain Text
http://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html [unicode.org]

The existing ligatures exist basically for compatibility and round-tripping with non-Unicode character sets. Their use is discouraged. No more will be encoded in any circumstances.