Andy Simpson spotted a local panel that was using unicode to make the business name stand out from the rest. Andy was doing a normal search for a barber shop and this listing came up in Google’s local results, which caught his eye. You can see it yourself by searching for [nathan’s tonsorial parlor].

Here is a screen shot:

On the search side, Google tends to drop out of ignore special characters from showing like this in search. It is not a new thing, it goes back before 2003, Google even dropped emojis from search and had them come back.

I am not sure if this unicode in the Google local listings will stick but we will see.

Forum discussion at Local Search Forums and Twitter.