--- title: "A big bug in Google" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/10/7/a-big-bug-in-google.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/10/7/a-big-bug-in-google.html" published: "2003-10-07T20:33:00" updated: "2003-10-07T20:33:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Seth Finkelstein has made a startling discovery, backed with lots of evidence : when a spam result comes up in a search, Google not only blocks the spam, but every result after it. This means that for searches where…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # A big bug in Google By Roy Osherove October 7, 2003 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published October 7, 2003; technical details may be outdated.

Seth Finkelstein has made a startling discovery, backed with lots of evidence: when a spam result comes up in a search, Google not only blocks the spam, but every result after it. This means that for searches where spam results manage to rise to the top, very few -- sometimes zero -- results will be returned.

Examples: motorcycle candle, keyboard bracelet. These are common words for which you'd expect to see results (in fact, the latter even says there are thousands of results) but the bug prevents them from being seen. Eliminating the spam pages (by blocking a word, antenna, that appears on them) allows full results to be displayed.

It's pretty amazing that such a serious bug made it past Google's tests. It will be interesting to see how quickly it's fixed.

\[[Google weblog](http://google.blogspace.com/archives/001051)\] Amazing. **Update:** **Even more freaky**, Pieter Visser found out that [searching for “vb.net” on Google](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=vb.net) returns only one result! but see what happens when doing the [same search excluding .com sites](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=vb.net+-site%3Acom).. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Oct 13, 2003 ### [Feedable will be offline a bit](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/10/13/feedable-will-be-offline-a-bit.html) - Oct 8, 2003 ### [Describing and evaluating API usability at Microsoft](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/10/8/describing-and-evaluating-api-usability-at-microsoft.html) - Oct 6, 2003 ### [.Net Blogging MVP - a myth?](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/10/6/net-blogging-mvp-a-myth.html) - Oct 5, 2003 ### [Geek marriage - Episode I](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/10/5/geek-marriage-episode-i.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/