Bug causes Google to return porn results when searching for "-4^(1/4)"

http://www.quora.com/Google-Search/What-does-4-1-4-mean-and-why-is-it-connected-to-porn

by fraqed • 13 years ago

25 7 13 years ago

lucian1900• 13 years ago

One can already search for porn explicitly in google. I don't see how it's that big a deal that some meaningless queries return noise, it's not like anyone is likely to be making those queries on purpose.

drivebyacct2• 13 years ago

Quite frankly, the other day I attempted to track down a humorous but "pornographic" image that I had seen many moons ago. It was all but impossible on Image search even though I'd found it before the recent SafeSearch changes.

I don't really understand the rationale for the change... was there just too much stuff leaking through SafeSearch or what?

DanBC• 13 years ago

It's interesting that some results return noise, but others don't.

[-3 "3 4"] returns porn links.

[-3 "2 3 4"] returns nothing.

[-fish "fish and chips"] returns nothing.

Curiosity, especially about the small things that break, is a strong feature of hacker mentality.

lambda• 13 years ago

I don't think it's interesting in a "hey look, you can find porn on Google." It's interesting in that it's a bug that produces results for imposible queries, but for some reason seems to mostly turn up porn results. Is that just a statistical sampling; so much of Google's index is porn, that a random bug which picks up impossible results, that thus don't go through its safe search feature, is predominantly porn? Or is the bug somehow linked to the safe search feature, accidentally turning the blacklist into a whitelist?

wsgeek• 13 years ago

That is not a bug, that's a feature!

thyrsus• 13 years ago

Perhaps the bug isn't specifically selecting "adult" material, but that such material comprises such a large proportion of all (indexable) material, that it's what an effective random sampling returns.

Jagat• 13 years ago

From the article

" Google software engineer Jeremy Hoffman commented in the Quora thread, saying it was a bug:

As a web search query, [-4^(1/4)] is interpreted like [-4 "1 4"], as in ”Find me pages which contain a 1 next to a 4, but which do not contain a 4.” This should return zero results, because it is impossible to satisfy both requirements. However, we have uncovered a bug that causes some web pages to “match” these contradictory queries. Since these are the only results that “match” the query, they are the results that get shown. We are working on a bug fix. Thanks to the Quora community for bringing this to our attention."

Bug causes Google to return porn results when searching for "-4^(1/4)"

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