I was trying to fix some quirks in our lazy link system today, and I came across an annoying issue. My code was causing each apostrophe to display as the HTML Charcter Set equivalent. It looked similar to this:

That’s

As I usually do, I turned to trusty Google for help. To gather some broad info, I typed in:

’

I was greeted with a blank page. Sadly, my second brain was empty. As I expected, a single apostrophe also caused Google to return a blank page. I can understand why there are no results for a single apostrophe, but an error message would help out.

It turns out Yahoo and MSN are sympathetic to my situation. A single apostrophe returns a “no results found” message while typing in the full character code returns actual results.

HTML Form Builder
Ryan Campbell

I Broke Google by Ryan Campbell

This entry was posted 5 years ago and was filed under Notebooks.
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· 3 Comments! ·

  1. Brian Benzinger · 5 years ago

    Wow, will you look at that. Never would have thought about searching for an apostrophe =p interesting. Yeah, google should add some sort of notification or something.

  2. Stefan · 5 years ago

    Maybe there’s some hidden Google SQL injection vulnerability behind this that wants to be explored? ;-)

  3. Jamal · 5 years ago

    you should have tried you search with out the semi-colon on the end of &#8217

    :o)