God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Breaking Google with advanced search operators
Or: What is it with all of the weird Google Books/YouTube results?
If you're an advanced SEO or have an interest in search engines, then you're more than likely well-acquainted with the various advanced search operators, from getting site-specific results from site: and link: searches, to finding relationships between words with the tilde, or even querying particular parts of the index with operators like intitle:
If you do as much of that type of searching as I do, then you may have noticed odd, irrelevant "backfill" style results coming from Google's "universal search" providers like Google Books and YouTube. This is harder to explain that to demonstrate. Let's try a search for [site:site:]:
Notice the odd, irrelevant book search results. These are the usual contenders for this sort of search - perhaps notable as "classic" literature.
Let's throw in a bit of YouTube. Try a search for [site:*]
Another win for Joseph Conrad, but notice all the YouTube results? These are very changeable (unlike the Books results) but they can be consistently retrieved. Those doing this sort of searching frequently will know there's a lot of other ways to trigger this type of result set searching with combinations of advanced operators.
I confess, I've been aware of this for years and have never noticed it discussed anywhere. I've always had in the back of my mind that there's something important to learn from it, but I confess I'm mostly stumped. If anyone has any suggestions, they'd be greatly appreciated!
16.07.2009. 21:02
Just to note, those searches no longer return any results for me
Your search - site:site: - did not match any documents.
Your search - site:* - did not match any documents.
today, site:site: returned one ad and two spurious youtube results, while site:* nothing at all. no time for more checks.
Samuel Bronson said on 11.02.2011. 22:07
I think these are what electrical engineers would refer to as "don't cares": the queries are nonsensical, and there's no actual criteria in them, so it doesn't really matter what the results are as long as they aren't obscene or unnecessarily insulting. (Though linking the user to a help page would probably not be a bad idea in such cases.)
Recent Responses:
Page last (manually) updated: October 14, 2011.
Questions, comments, insults or praise? Have your say: