[thelist] [OT] Breaking Google...

Roger Ly evolt at matchpenalty.com
Thu Oct 23 11:16:32 CDT 2003


I guess it doesn't really matter that it is breaking unless there are
Google employees monitoring the list.  But, for what it's worth, this is
the search that I do:

"blah ' blah"

When you search, make sure you include both the double-quotes and the
single-quote.

You get a bunch of syntax errors, and they are all due to an error in a
line similar to this:

<td id=t1
onClick="c('http://images.google.com/images?q=%22blah+'+blah%22&hl=en&lr
=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&safe=off','wi',event);"
style=cursor:pointer;cursor:hand; class=q bgcolor=#efefef width=60
nowrap><center><font size=-1><a id=t1a class=q
href=http://images.google.com/images?q=%22blah+'+blah%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UT
F-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&safe=off&sa=N&tab=wi onClick="return
b('http://images.google.com/images?q=%22blah+'+blah%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-
8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&safe=off','wi',event);">&nbsp;Images&nbsp;</a></f
ont></center></td>

Where the the onClick handlers in both the <td> and the <a> see their
first argument prematurely terminated with the '.  It seems like if they
were to escape the ' with %27, similar to how they escape their double
quotes with %22, everything would be fine.

Actually, now that I look at it again, it even errors for me when I
search for:

Roger's

Or anything with a single quote.

Oh well, not much we can really do about it now, hopefully someone at
Google will notice this.

Roger

 



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