Is there any search engine that fills the gap where the normal search engines returns zero results.

Occasionally I need to do a search containing special characters. Like for instance searching for the gnu building configure parameter "--with-newlib". It is not rare for google to completely destroying the specific string och characters I want to search for and turning up with nothing or nothing useful.

It is really annoying knowing your desired search term is really common but not being able to return a single result.

edit:
google code search seems to have it's uses but it doesn't search the web at all. I would much rather have highly ranked web pages containing the search term when I'm searching the web.