Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Google Special Character Search String Bug

There are only two special characters (on a standard keyboard) that return any results in Google. The other 20 symbols force Google to return a blank page. Not a page that says 0 Results Returned, but literally a blank page. Only the standard Google header and footer are displayed.

These are the only symbols that return any results.
& (ampersand)
_ (underscore)

These 20 return no result count at all and are a bug (or a feature as I'm sure Google would claim).
` acute apostraphe
~ tilda
! exclamation point
@ at sign
## pound
$ dollar sign
% percent
^ carat
* asterick
( left parenthesis
) right parenthesis
- dash
= equal sign
+ plus sign
/ right slash
, comma
< less than symbol
. period
> greater than symbol
? question mark
; semi-colon
: colon
' apostraphe
" double quote
[ left bracket
{ left curly bracker
] right bracket
} right curly bracket
\ left slash
| pipe symbol

What can be learned from this mysterious behavior in Google's search results?
The two that return search results & (ampersand) and _ (underscore) are not part of any special query syntax used by Google and are found quite often in business names (at least the ampersand is). There must be something more to the fact that the underscore returns results but I have yet to put my finger on it.

Google allows you to conduct advanced searches using specific symbols and constructs and calls them the Advanced Search Operators as seen here. Further below I show the list of Google's publicly known advanced search operators.

For example: if you want to find all of the pages Google has indexed on marketingshift you'd simply type site:www.marketingshift.com.

The key here is the ":" (colon) because it tells Googles query parser to look for a special search construct operator to the left of the colon. Thus it makes sense that Google doesn't use the ":" (colon) in determining relevance on a given page. But it makes no sense to not inform the user via the search results page of this behavior. This only explains a few symbols on the list of special characters causing the blank search results page to be shown.

The complete list of advanced search operators in Google are as follows
~ (when placed in front of a word also finds results with synonyms for that word)
" (used to search for exact phrases when enclosing a phrase in double quotes)
- (used when you want to exclude a term from the search results or to subtract numbers)
+ (used to require a term in addition to the main keyphrase in the search results or to add numbers)
: (string to left of colon denotes special type of search to execute)
* (wildcard character that represents one or more words or to multiply numbers)
/ (used to divide numbers)
% (used to calculate a percentage)
^ (used to raise the power of a number)
... (used to define a range of numbers to search between)

That leaves us with at least 18 other special characters that return no results.
` (acute apostraphe)
! (exclamation point)
@ (at sign)
# (pound)
$ dollar sign
( (left parenthesis)
) (right parenthesis)
= (equal sign)
, (comma)
< (less than symbol) > (greater than symbol)
? (question mark)
; (semi-colon)
' (apostraphe)
[ (left bracket)
{ (left curly bracker)
] (right bracket)
} (right curly bracket)
\ (left slash)
| (pipe symbol)

My best guess is that it was easier for Google to exclude all special keyboard characters by default and explicitly handle the list of known advanced search operators since that would require less resources. I also think another factor adding to them excluding the terms is that they'll have uses for them later (or are already testing more advanced query syntax currently)
and will use them in their other niche search efforts. I combed through the Google search features page but didn't find anything that gave me a better clue of up and coming (or existing) query syntax that might use the symbols but then again, I'm no Google Engineer.

But no matter what this is a bug and just gets added to the list of other Google bugs.

Steps to Breaking Google
1.) go to google.com (duh)
2.) enter any of the 18 special characters mentioned 2 paragraphs up
3.) laugh, snort and IM your buddies the link to show them what a genius you are

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 02:23 PM
Permanent Link: Google Special Character Search String Bug | Comments (4)

(4) Comments on Google Special Character Search String Bug

I found your post because I was searching for the meaning of an error message that contains a '#' symbol.

Yahoo and A9 block # as well.

Seems that the search engine companies are creating a black hole in the world's search space. i.e. You could hide information in plain site by exploiting the special character bug of all the major search engines.

Comments by Ed : Wednesday, August 23, 2006 at 07:01 PM

Is there any search engine that provides search results for characters like # etc or words containing such characters?

if you search Google for #100 it returns the same results as for 100 but if you search for $100 they were forced to make an exception and it returns different results thatn for 100

Google are nuts. Their so called exact (quoted) search is not exact either. When asked about this they don't reply.

Comments by John Middlemas : Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 02:35 PM

Um...how long have you folks been online? Really?

Char() programming has been in search engines starting with Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, and later Prodigy, before most people had their first version of Windows.

These "bugs" are intentional, and all search engines are different upon encoding.

If I were you, I would take this post down.

It has been the subject of laughter and ridicule thruought IT professionals.

Comments by [ARB1D3_[00L3R : Monday, September 25, 2006 at 04:57 PM

Hi,

http://www.google.com/apis/reference.html
might help you, although you will find there are some long words in there which may be difficult.

Comments by progman : Saturday, November 04, 2006 at 09:58 AM

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