Google Search, Special Characters

We all have used google, and many of us at some point felt the need to look for some code that contains special characters. For example, someone might have tried to type in the following : "alert("Hello World!");" with the quotations and all. But Google Search does not give (AFAIK) any way to escape special characters, special to Google Search itself that is. Also other special characters that have no special meaning to Google Search might not work when using them in a search query. More examples include how to search for something including: the * character like "Select * From", the # character like "#region Utility", the ? character like "DateTime? myDate", etc... These are what I can recall now, if you come up with other examples I will list them here. Also, wouldn't it be nice if we had search where we can use Regular Expressions to look for strings containing new lines for example? In fact Google Code Search has some of that functionality, but apparently that returns results from Google Code only.
I think that these features must be available as Advanced Search in Google Search itself. Any comment or ideas? Shoot.