Searching for a star

The name “*** Dave” (and “***Dave”) is scattered all over the Internet. Alas … how to find it?

Problem? Google (and pretty much everyone else) treats an asterisk in a search string as a wildcard. Searching for “*** Dave” means (to Google) “search for ‘Dave’ with anything preceding it.” All the search engine stuff I can find indicate an asterisk is used as a wildcard or truncation character in all of them.

Not much good for narrowing the search down. Hoist by my own typography.

Anyone have any good clues on how to tell search engines to treat the wildcard asterisk as a literal character?