N_Cook wrote:
"Google can find lots of different things, but at this writing,
it can't find special characters in its search results.
That's a shame, because special characters can come in handy.
The tilde (~), for example, denotes personal web pages.

There was a time
when the tilde served a syntactical purpose with Google.
It meant "give me anything close".
In seeking out a broader (more stupid) clientele,
Google has dumbed down their syntax and the new default is
*show me whatever crap is even remotely close*;
now folks who actually know what they want
are the ones that end up with cluttered, verbose URLs.