Why would M# be harder to Google than C#?

Question

I read just now in a comment on another question titled Effective Googling for short names

C# isn't bad to Google for at all. It would be a lot harder if it were called M#, by the way.

Why? What am I missing?

Answer 1

I'll put up my opinion extrapolated from my comment.

As others have suggested, special chars are ignored by Google. But C# may have had a head start in not being ignored (or at least turned into "C") because of the musical note C# which was probably allowed for searches like "Some piece of music in C#". M# would not have benefited such.

Answer 2

It turns out I was somewhat wrong. I had thought that C# just happened to benefit from an understanding of musical keys - a search for "G#" finds plenty of results about the musical key of G#. (This is shown by experimentation, by the way - despite working at Google I don't know anything about the search engine. At least, not on this front.)

However, in this case not only does C# benefit from the musical key side of things, but Google's own help pages explain that C# and other programming languages are special-cased:

Punctuation that is not ignored

• Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.
• The dollar sign ($) is used to indicate prices. [ nikon 400 ] and [ nikon $400 ] will give different results.
• The hyphen - is sometimes used as a signal that the two words around it are very strongly connected. (Unless there is no space after the - and a space before it, in which case it is a negative sign.)
• The underscore symbol _ is not ignored when it connects two words, e.g. [ quick_sort ].

It would be interesting to know how long it would take a theoretical language "M#" to become searchable... but I'm not going to start speculating on that in a public forum :)

(Note that the Spec# home page comes up as the second link when you search Google for Spec#. At least it's there and pretty prominent though.)