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The Register

Google bug blocks thousands of sites
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 10/10/2003 at 06:17 GMT

Google, like the rest of us, seems to be fighting a losing battle to make sense of a rising tide of Internet garbage. But a programming error by the search engine has compounded the problem: by inadvertently blocking thousands of sites from Google users.

It's been called a "Google-NACK": you enter a particular search term and Google tells you that there are thousands of matching results, but fails to return many, or any results.

For example, a search for keyboard bracelet returns just five sites out of "about 49,900". (Your mileage may vary, as Google results differ depending on where you are, and which way the Segway scooters are pointing - but it's a fairly typical figure.)

What's happening? Award-winning researcher Seth Finkelstein has a theory why. Google's own spam filters, designed to weed out link farms created by pornographers and spammers and Scientologists, are crude, and are blocking many innocent sites.

"Technical solutions may have unintended consequences," he says.

"When Google searches for combinations of terms, pages with the terms close to each other are ranked highly. Such pages are also unfortunately often search spam pages, using a mismash of keywords.

Thus, an unusual combination of words (and a dedicated spammer) will bring spam pages near the top of the results for certain keyword searches."

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