

Bug causes Google to return porn results when searching for "-4^(1/4)" - fraqed
http://www.quora.com/Google-Search/What-does-4-1-4-mean-and-why-is-it-connected-to-porn

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lucian1900
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.

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DanBC
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.

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thyrsus
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.

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Jagat
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."

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

