How do you search for symbols without knowing what they're called?

Question

This is a question that's been bothering me for a while, and it's likely that there's no way around it. But I was curious if anyone has any techniques for dealing with this.

How do you search on a symbol using a search engine (such as Google or Bing) without knowing the symbol's name...? Most standard search engines seem to ignore symbols... (e.g. @, ^, etc. Searching for something like "Java ++ operator" just gives you results for "Java operator".) Are there any engines that don't? Is there any other way to do this?

Answer 1

You can always look at a character map, search the page for the character, and get the name

Example:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/special_characters/

Or use Wikipedia to get the name

Example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/å

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@

Answer 2

You can try this, so you can draw the symbol and then work backwards from the command to what it designates: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html