I searched for [✓ ★] (the HTML entities for checkmark and star). Instead of repeating my search query, Google used the entities themselves in the reply "Your search – ✓ ★ – did not match any documents". The search box still showed the entities as I entered them (in HTML notation), at least when using the new URL format which I'm getting:
google.com/#hl=en&q=%26%23 ...

When in Chrome with the old URL format, my search as shown in the search box is converted to symbols:
google.com/search?hl=en&q= ...

(I would have kind of expected that Google would escape the ampersand in all cases and thus show the search as it was everywhere.)