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Google results linking to questions containing smart ("curly") quotes seem to only give part of the title.

e.g. the question Converting ″Straight Quotes″ to “Curly Quotes” (searchable through something like http://google.com/search?q=2202811+quotes) gives: Converting ″Straight Quotes - Stack Overflow.

Is this something Stack Overflow should try to work around, or is it Google's fault? (Or both?)

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  • 2
    I perform enough 'remove tag from title' edits that I will keep this in mind and remove them if I'm in an edit. Thanks!
    – user4039065
    Commented Aug 27, 2015 at 21:46
  • 30
    There's nothing smart about using those quotes -_-
    – TylerH
    Commented Aug 27, 2015 at 22:24
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    @mwfearnley, Note that it's not just about straight quotes, I've seen this happening with many other unicode characters.
    – Pacerier
    Commented Aug 28, 2015 at 6:58
  • Presumably people are not going to be searching for 2202811 quotes (particularly often). Do you have a (presumably) more common query which gives this result?
    – Bernhard Barker
    Commented Aug 29, 2015 at 12:34
  • I've run into this with the Stack Exchange search and asked about it on Meta.SE. That's not quite the same as Google's search, of course, but special characters do seem to cause problems all around. See meta.stackexchange.com/q/202610/225437, meta.stackexchange.com/q/202612/225437, meta.stackexchange.com/q/202417/225437.
    – Joshua Taylor
    Commented Aug 29, 2015 at 14:28

1 Answer 1

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I think the clue is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en

However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant.

Searching for the text of the question I have an application... gives this result: javascrit - converting straight quotes to curly quotes

So it looks like it's used the query to modify the title of the page. As to why it does that, I'm not sure. It does look like Google's fault, and it's probably not worth trying to reverse engineer.

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