How can i search for an item for sale using the english pound (£)
symbol in an advanced search with a search engine? It does'nt work with "near"
or the "+" symbol Eg fzr600 +£. Can any search engines do this type of search?

I've yet to see one that can.

Try this:

600 pounds sterling

example:

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=600+pounds+sterling

this query will get you returns that show £600, as you were looking to accomplish.

cheers

The above search only works if the pages also include the phrase
"pounds sterling". It is however a partial solution.

How about restricting your searches to the .UK domain like this?
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=fzr600+site%3A.uk

Many site owners add an 'html' ampersand to their the html code for
the pound, instead of an actual ampersand. (&)

Here is an example using a search for motorcycle :

motorcycle £
://www.google.com/search?q=motorcycle+%26pound%3B

Most (all?) search engines can't search for non-ASCII characters due
to the nature of their indexing capabilities.

Mmmm.

I've just tried an advanced search with AlltheWeb.  My search query
was "£500" - including the quotation marks, and the Web results were
very similar to those supplied by a Google search to this same query.

BUT: playing with the Language options I moved down to the two Western
European options, and found that the Web results came up exactly the
same, but they were headed by two News items which both included
"£500" in the text.  (Going back to the default Unicode option, the
tow news items were still there, I may have missed them first time.)

This seems worth exploring further - it seems that parts of AlltheWeb
recognize the £ sign.

What I don't understand, Perry, is that Google itself is diacritical
conscious.  It distinguishes a search for père (pere with a grave
accent) from a search for pere (with no accent) and so on.  Granted
the pound sign £ is not an accent, but...  I tried google.co.uk too,
but still no luck.

I am sure there is more to come on this.  Interesting question!

More mmmm.

Tried pasting the £ sign again on AlltheWeb (search for £500) and got
mixed results in News: one accurate hit and one which just found 500.

I have also tried a selection of UK only search engines - and again
mixed results.  The £ sometimes shows up along with the figure, and
sometimes it doesn't, on the very same search engine.  There are
plenty more UK-specific search engines to try, and it strikes me that
this could be where you will achieve most relevance, but I am not
holding my breath!

This symbol is currently not indexed.  If you wanted to search for it,
entering it into the search field would suffice.  You can verify this
is in the search URL, as the "£" symbol would be changed to the HTML
special character code "%A3".