How do search engines handle special characters like trademarks and copyright symbols? Is it OK to place these symbols at the end of a word, or should I put a space between the word and the symbol? ~Adam
I honestly don't think you should worry about it too much. How often do people use trademark symbols anyway? To be safe I guess, put a space.
A lot of special characters are ignored by search engines. For example, searching for %$xyz produces the same results as a search for |}xyz. I'm fairly sure that G's stemming algo recognizes special characters as not being characters useful in pselling words and therefore ignores them. To me that means you should be pretty safe (at least with G) to place copyright and trademark symbols right next to your words.
I'm not sure if this is relevant or not, but while trying to make my pages w3c-compliant, I used a free HTML editor (HTML-Kit), and it changed some of these types of characters from the character itself to it's HTML equivalent. For example, '©' was changed to '©'. I'm not sure how this would affect the SEs, but I thought I'd mention it in case it may help someone. Sam