I was looking to see what search sites might
have a particular bug that I (ahem) came across and
was trying the search for the number 0 in various
places. There is a pretty good Wikipedia
page about zero. Zero has a rich and interesting
history and there are many other potentially
reasonable results.
But I was surprised to see MSN search had demoted their good results below some crappy ones from MSDN:
Lame! Falling into an inferior lex position and a lower overall relevance page to boost their own network results...give em credit for being old school. :)
...
I found my bug on Yahoo Search. I had tried a lot of smaller engines first because I didn't think a major would have this bug. You can't search for 0 on Yahoo. You can search for all the other numbers, but not 0 ...
Why?.. Because 0 is false. It suggests Yahoo is using a scripting language to front
their search form, and a programmer did something like if ( $query ) rather than if ( $query ne '' ).
Comments (13)
The searching for zero thing on Yahoo is an interesting find.
Posted by webprofessor | April 24, 2008 5:00 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 05:00
Try searching for 0 on AltaVista. It searches for 'restrict' instead.
Posted by Andrew | April 24, 2008 5:02 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 05:02
I'm sure plenty of folk will have fun trying to rip your product a new one when its out Rich, best hold the criticism until you can fend off the angry farmers with pitch forks.
;p
Posted by Al | April 24, 2008 5:07 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 05:07
They'll do that anyway, Al. :)
The searching for 0 thing is a minor bug, easily fixed and is more amusing than anything.
The MSN search results issue is not a technology criticism. It's lame because their algorithm would have worked great by itself. But they clobbered it with a blatant editorial choice to override the algorithm with self-promotion.
Editorial choices in google are more subtle and harder to spot. It's rare to see such an obvious editorial bias these days. That's why it's interesting... especially coming from a company trying to gain more credibility in search.
Posted by Rich Skrenta | April 24, 2008 5:25 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 05:25
On the other hand Google does not even get the Wikipedia entry on the first page. There are just too many products/services that use "0" in their name to have that be a reasonable search case - try "0 (number)" and all of them prioritize the reasonable pages to the top.
Yes Microsoft prioritized their content to the top but they also hit a reasonable choice in the top three which was better than most of the search providers I checked (after reading this entry ). The only major that was smack on that I found was AOL search (!?! - not a search engine that I normally try!)
Posted by Tom Chizek | April 24, 2008 6:12 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 06:12
I get the wikipedia page for 0 in pos 1 on Google. The rest of kindof not-so-good. MSN has the "0/1 knapsack problem" page which is a nice answer, but the rest are so-so as well.
Posted by Rich Skrenta | April 24, 2008 6:16 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 06:16
Re: The searching for "0" on Yahoo! thing. If you use their Web Search API you get the expected results.
Posted by Danny DiPaolo | April 24, 2008 7:56 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 07:56
Yeah you can quote "0" too and avoid the bug.
Posted by Rich Skrenta | April 24, 2008 8:48 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 08:48
Google used to choke when you searched for random html entities. they used to just have a blank page come up... no message saying "zero results"... nothing.
looks like they fixed it since i wrote about it. the bugs i found are here if you wanna check em out
Yahoo has other issues when you search for stuff like •
Posted by Arin | April 24, 2008 9:29 AM
Posted on April 24, 2008 09:29
If you search for 00 on Yahoo you get results. Shouldn't that be the same value?
Posted by Chris N. | April 24, 2008 5:42 PM
Posted on April 24, 2008 17:42
This is PHP bug #46, out of about 45,000
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46
Shows you how old the version of php that yahoo is using....
Posted by Jason Culverhouse | April 25, 2008 4:45 PM
Posted on April 25, 2008 16:45
Search for 0 in msn search for me doesn't bring up anything Microsoft related.
Are you sure it might not just be taking into account something you've searched previously? I know Google does that for me sometimes - ranking things that I've searched for previously higher, even when they're not related to what I'm searching for now.
Posted by Gabriel Womacks | April 25, 2008 8:13 PM
Posted on April 25, 2008 20:13
They've fixed it.. no more MSDN promotion in 0's results..
Posted by Rich Skrenta | April 29, 2008 10:39 AM
Posted on April 29, 2008 10:39