Google still treats most punctuation as spaces within phrase searches. For example, the latter search would match a sentence/clause transition like "ITU-T: 800

Google still treats most punctuation as spaces within phrase searches. For example, the latter search would match a sentence/clause transition like "ITU-T: 800 items". There are enough results actually mentioning T.800 that you probably won't see that, but if it's a genuinely rare phrase you can end up with multiple pages completely full of useless results. For example, there was an article posted to HN a while back in which an interviewee mentioned "race liberals" as a political alignment. When I tried searching for this phrase, Google almost exclusively matched "race, liberals" and "race. Liberals".