"±" character (ANSI 177) and search engines

Hi,
I was looking up a chemical on Google:
(±)-b-Butyrolactone
and got a huge hit list of pages that had nothing to do with chemicals.
If I modify the query to:
b-Butyrolactone
resulting hit list contains pertinent pages, some even containing
"(±)-b-Butyrolactone"
Tried the same thing on AltaVista:
0 hits with the original query and similar results to Google when I removed
the "±" character (ANSI 177).
Anybody know what's going on here?
Thanks, Mike


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