3. Formulating your Google query: accents, upper and lower case...

3.1 Accents

In its online help, Google specifies that it is "insensitive to accents". This means that, theoretically, a query with a word containing accented or non-accented characters gets the same number of results. However, the engine sometimes gives different answers when words are written with or without their accents, particularly when these are entered between quotation marks. To avoid missing out on relevant results, especially for a specific search, it's best to test queries with accented characters, then without.