Weird Google behaviour
While browsing the web today, I’ve found something weird about Google! If you perform a search for one of the following characters:
` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ ( ) - = + { } [ ] | \ : ; ” < > , . ? /
Google simply dies! It doesn’t even return the “Your search did not match any documents message”. See for yourself!
I keep wondering why this happens…
google is not perfect you know
so there is somethings that you cannot find on google
and you have proved it
Lol! Yes! That’s right! Google doesn’t have all the answers, and I’ve proven it!
onTopic: Might be a missplaced “if” somewhere…
Simple enough, google is parsing your query and considers any non letter or digit character as a binding character. Searching for Tudor-Barbu will be the same as searching for “Tudor Barbu”. If you write something like this-is.a,complete-sentence and then you go to Advanced Search you will see what I mean.
It makes only sense to trim any query of these characters. Also, searching for stuff like “10-2″ will start Google Calculator.
I think it is because their indexing engine works with words, not letters. When searching for something, the query is split into words, then they are entered in equations based on grammar rules and word clusters and what not, then the search is performed.
This might be the case, but a simple “You’re retarded! Enter a real query!!!” message would have been nice…
After giving it some thought: if you run a blank query on Google - aka the q parameter in the URL is null or missing - you will be redirected to the first page. That doesn’t happen if q is a dot or another character in that list…
[…] Tudor thinks that searching for special characters (like ` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ ( ) - = + { } [ ] | : ; ” < > , . ? /) on Google, generates a weird behavior. Others try to explain why that happens, in the comments area. I had no clue about what is this about, so I’ve googled for: “google about special characters” and found some other people that try to explain that ‘weird behavior’: Google Special Character Search String Bug How to search for special characters I’ve tried other search engines and they all returned no content, but at least they suggested trying other keywords (or search help elsewhere, like Yahoo! Answers ). My opinion is that Google tried to simplify the algorithm as much as possible but disregarded some minor negative effects on some sensible users. Because I had a lack of inspiration lately, instead of posting my little research on Tudor’s blog as a comment, I’ve posted this as an article in my own blog. But there is a possibility that, because I’ve put a link to his post, this one will be shown as a trackback, therefore as a comment. Because I want to respect Tudor’s requirement, I had to write this in English. […]