I noticed a news story about Ireland which had a Shamrock like symbol (this: ♣) in the title. I searched for the title and found the symbol did not show in the SERPS.
goodroi
12:00 pm on Nov 17, 2010 (gmt 0)
search engines have been inconsistent with their handling of special characters. sometimes they ignore them & other times they show up in the serps.
in the past some webmasters liked to use special characters that display as an arrow, so their site title in the serp starts with an arrow. that drives up the click through rate but also brings in some other issues.
in general i avoid using special characters because not all browsers can handle them properly.
