Special Characters on meta tags makes any difference?

Does SE treat the same "ñ" than "ñ" or "í" than "&iaccute&;"?

[silverbytes]

I made a search for single word using ñ special character (also applies to accented vocals like á, ú and so on)

I see many special characters not encoded at all and page ranking ok. I see others doing the encode like ""ñ" instead.

To me makes no difference at all. I wonder if converting those ñ to ñ in my pages worth the effort?

[Morgenhund]

I'd opted for "ñ", since I once bumped across search engine that did not understand "ñ"-like characters. Not G., of course--a local SE, but with local market share.

The only difference between ñ and ñ is that "ñ" will look same at page with any character encoding, and ñ will not.

I'd opted for "ñ", unless you have to show national symbols inside non-UTF pages.