Most punctuation isn't indexed. A few terms like C++ and C# are special-cased, and a hyphen usually works, but mostly you just can't search for anything punctuation-related for programming. I was recently trying to learn the difference between the <%= and <%# tags in ASP.NET and Google couldn't even understand the query.
Not that it's an easy problem. How are the spiders and indexers supposed to distinguish "true?" as a programming lexeme versus just an interrogative sentence that ends with "true"?
Sometimes we forget that Google and the other search engines aren't a byte-for-byte search across the entire web. The pages are all tokenized and indexed, with most punctuation dropped since that is indeed the more common usage case. You don't want a search for a word to miss out on pages where the word was glued to quotes or a comma or something.
