Second, my (admittedly limited) understanding of search functions is that to implement a search for special characters, the search protocol must know what character set you're working from, and while you're using Microsoft's [Alt] key to create accented characters, other people are using Apples [⌘] key, and some of us use html entity references.

In my understanding that's not necessary, as all pages on DW get UTF8 encoded no matter what you used to put the characters in.

(And as an completely unrelated aside, I have a German keyboard :) my father used to have an American keyboard, like, 10 years back, because it is a bit easier to use for programming, that's why I learned the Alt stuff)