Google is apparently doing more punctuation indexing these days than it has in the past.

Honestly, I can’t recall ever searching for just a “.” or just a “!” or other punctuation marks, but evidently Google historically has not provided results for them. Now they do, as Alex Chitu at Google Operating System points out.

Here’s a search for “.”:

Here’s one for “!”:

And one for “,”:

Bing does not return results for any of these.

Neither does Yahoo. Neither does Blekko. Neither does Facebook.

Other punctuation/symbols Google is showing results for include: :,;,#, %,@, ^, ), ~,|, “, <, and $.