Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Google Bug: "nissan armada headrest monitor"

I thought this was pretty interesting. When I searched on Google for nissan armada headrest monitor I found one of the results pages description spanning across the entire screen even covering up the sponsored results. I highlighted the offending description in orange in the image below.



I'm using internet explorer v.6 (a.k.a. ie6) on Win2k.

Typically you'll see something like this on a smaller website that allows html as part of the descriptions but as we all know, Google only lists plain text for the description of a url in it's index. Being the geek that I am I decided to do a little digging.

I went to the offending url and searched for part of the description Google had listed...

Find (ctrl + f) > "8,video,toyota,cienna,overhead,console,nissan" and found the description was in a very small font in plain view on the top of the page. So nothing fishy there.

Then I decided to look at the source code to see if there is was an applet or some screwey css causing the problem.

Right Click > View Source > Find (ctrl + f) > "8,video,toyota,cienna,overhead,console,nissan"

I found the content was listed verbatim in the Keywords tag 3 times and in the title tag 2 times. I then found it listed in the main body of the document twice as well.

While the repition of each of the string of text I searched for in the html document was blatant spamming, it didn't explain why there was a long string of text spanning the length of Google's result page in my browser.

Then it hit me, there isn't a space in that string of text anywhere on the page. Typically when the body of a page doesn't contain spaces Google will use the META description tag, the META keywords tag or the Title tag or not display a description of the url at all. In this case since all of the default places were stuffed with one long string of text it decided to use that string of text.

Now, before you get all excited thinking you've found a new way to "manipulate" Google's results, think again. I've already sent an email to Matt Cutts at Google letting him know about this anomaly and you can rest assured it'll get fixed faster than you can say "PageRank".

I also posted this entry on Andy Beal's blog so forgive me for committing textual diarrhea :)

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 11:41 AM
Permanent Link: Google Bug: "nissan armada headrest monitor" | Comments (0)

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