Hello all,
Few moments ago while I was searching for something using google, I discovered a bug, the bug simply that for a given string, the output is always nothing, I mean by nothing here not zero results found, I mean white page.
And as every software developer knows, and as we got from ACM contests, a valid function is that have a valid output for every input, so we all know that entering non-valid input for any program is not an excuse to crash or make nothing, the input string is to search simply for "\\." (without the quotations), and any way, I've tried the same input on MSN, Yahoo, and Altavista, and everyone of them handled it by its way, Yahoo seems to me that it has removed the "." and just searched for the "\\" part, both MSN and Altavista returned zero results.
A very weird thing one of my friends (yasser) discovered after that, that whenever you enter any special characters compination in Google (like "$%%^!"), you'll receive the same output, weird right?!!
Even if it's not a bug, it will be worst, because it's really weird to output a white paper for the user in which he doesn't know what's happening, for me as example, the first time I pressed search and I got this white result, I thought something is wrong in my connection and tried it several times (you know sometimes you may have some http errors which prevent some parts from any page from appearing), so when anyone got the same output, is it from Google or internet connection error, or something else?!
Cool, it's the first time for me to encounter white page in google :D
Monday, April 17, 2006
Bug in Google
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
No, they handled it, for example try this string:
"asdfgsdagsfda"
It'll output zero results, so now the zero results case is handled, so the other case Iam talking about is simply a bug :)
Although I agree with you that they shouldn't just display a white page but if you look at it you'll see the footer
Google Home - Advertising Programs - About Google
©2006 Google
And obviously there shoud be nothing under it so after anyone see that page he/she should know easily that there are not results
and secondly I don't know why should a normal user search for something like "\\", "$%%^!" or "asdfgsdagsfda"
but as I said above you're right that they should've shown a "No Results" message .
Heyyy man, the footer has no relation at all with the search engine results; this page is like a template where the results are appearing in that white space.
And yes, sometimes it outputs no results when there's no result, but now white page means nothing less than a bug
maybe it's a bug
about the footer, I was just commenting on
"(you know sometimes you may have some http errors which prevent some parts from any page from appearing)"
the appearance of the footer means that the page have been loaded successfully and that there is nothing lost in the middle .
ma3lesh asly ba3'eer 3la Google shwaya :D
There's no may be, A,B,C software engineering is stating:
"For every input, there must exist a valid output".
We mawdo3 te3'er 3aleha or no mayemna3shy enaha bug, we mesh bete7sal fe 2y search engine tany aslan :)
Post a Comment