Differences in Diacritics Handling

Beware of diacritics in search terms. The various search engines handle them in different ways. Take a diacritic like e with an acute accent 'é.' Will an 'e' match on both the 'e' as well as the e acute? At Google, searches will only be an exact match. At AltaVista and other search engines, the plain 'e' will match on both (and other 'e' diacritics). For example, a Google search for "epistolaires de mari" found only one hit while "épistolaires de mari" found more than a dozen. At AltaVista and other search engines, "epistolaires de mari" finds all the diacritic permutations. I hope to do a more in-depth diacritic showdown in the future, but for now, the lesson is to search both with and without the diacritics at Google for the most comprehensive search.