Diacritics in Google

An alert reader has noticed a change in the way the Google handles diacritics. In the past, words with no diacritics would match those with and vice versa, so either elephant or éléphant would find both elephant and éléphant. Now, elephant only matches the word without diacritics. To find the French version, éléphant must be used. Note that this differs from AltaVista where the plain elephant matches both but the diacritics version, éléphant, only matches éléphant. The lesson for the multilingual searcher is that in Google, use all diacritic variants if you want more than an exact match.