Bugs? Especially international bugs..

Every few weeks I like to call for Google bugs. I’ve got a joint meeting tomorrow with several people to talk about potential bugs, so if you know of any, feel free to mention them in the comments. To remind people of what I’m looking for, here’s the guidelines:

Just to be clear, pruning will be ruthless for this post: I only want to see specific queries that seem to show bugs, and the more concisely you can explain something, the better. I’ll probably keep just the first example of what looks like a bug. I’ve got a meeting at noon tomorrow to talk about search bugs, so I’ll probably lock the comments after that.

Please don’t include stuff like “it’s a bug that you (do something I don’t like, don’t index/rank my site as much as I want).” 🙂 Instead, I’m looking for specific bug reports to pass on.

In addition, I’d be curious to hear about any international bugs that you know of. If we don’t handle the top-level domain of Serbia correctly, or if we don’t do a currency conversion correctly, or concrete things like that are welcome..

226 Responses to Bugs? Especially international bugs.. (Leave a comment)

  1. Maybe not so much a bug, but a deficiency: Google Australia doesn’t have the same top nav bar layout that Google.com does. I’d use my local site more if it had this, it’s handy when switching to blog search etc…

  2. I am not sure if this is relevant but try a search on google for “search engine” what I see is funny because I do not see google anywhere in the first page!!! I guess goofle does not have enough PR 🙂

  3. On currency convertor:
    1 RUR in USD (Russian rouble) gives 24.8805732 for today (10/24/2007).
    Central bank of Russia gives us another 2 numbers: 24.8066 for 10/23/2007 and 24.9225 for 10/24/2007.
    I found nothing at citibank.com about RUR currency rate.
    Central Bank of Russia has a daily XML export for currency rates to Russian currency (I can help with this if you have interest), so that could be more correct to make calculations. Otherwise, the currency conversion is a bit useless for Russian google.ru, probably the same for other local Googles.

  4. It would be nice to be able in webmaster tools to set one or more target countries ie a .com hosted in the usa but targeting the uk

    for one exampel I work with a local hotel and they dont work as well in google.co.uk as they do in .com and not much point people looking for hotels in bedford texas or ma geting my clients site when its Bedford Uk specific.

  5. Not a bug, but a bad feature – searching for “ære” returns “aere” as top results. (It’s slightly better at google.no.) My point is: How likely is it that a English speaker (with a US keyboard) types “ære” in stead of “aere”? That “aere” returns results for “ære” makes more sense since there isn’t “æ” on the US keyboard. (Google is at least consistent – the same problem is present for “åre” and to some degree for “Øre”. Æ, Ø and Å is the extra characters in Norwegian outside US-ASCII.)

  6. This may be a feature, but we consider it a bug…

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS220US220&q=thai+san+francisco+yelp&btnG=Search

    Yelp Mobile results show up in the main index even though we’ve blocked Googlebot from crawling them (we’ve tested our robots.txt in the Webmaster console seems fine). Looks like you’re feeding mobile-Googlebot content into the main index which can cause dup content issues and potentially a bad user experience.

  7. Hi Matt,
    This isn’t search-related, but I’ll try my luck anyway. I’m trying to log into my blogger account from Taiwan, and it has decided that my being here means I am obviously fluent and is showing me the page in traditional Chinese. Very clever for figuring out my location correctly, but VERY annoying especially given I can’t see a ‘view in English’ link anywhere.

    Maybe my signup info just needs to take precedence over my physical location when the content negotiation wizardry takes place?

    Greg

  8. I have recently been having a problem in Webmaster Tools.

    When I choose the “Links” section then choose “external links” I am presented with m,y list of pages with their varying amount of links as usual, however, if I try to drill down and see the links for a specific page I get a server busy, try again later message.
    Now I would simply believe this is true but I get it 80% of the time when examining my home page. Can we look into this?

    -Diablos

  9. I found a bug at google webmaster tools . actually I am not sure is it bug or international thing. but when I try to verify my site with “Upload an html file” it does not work and it always says there is temporarily system problem. but its been more then 6 month I mean come on 😀 I have not verify any of my site with this property.. its not about search but a google bug anyway.

    thanks

  10. This is for Google Analytics when accessed via Firefox browsers.

    It is possible to crash Firefox under a specific situation – I see this happen maybe once a month.

    Log into Analytics account
    Click on “view reports” for a website account
    Click on the date selector “reveal”
    Click on yesterdays date
    Click on Apply Range
    Click on Page Views
    Click on Hourly
    Click again on the date selector “reveal”

    Now, at times if then click on today’s date – the Firefox webbrowser will crash and close down. I then restart using the session restore.

    As it is intermittent, it is probably going to be a right pain to track down – sorry!

  11. Matt

    UK Google mobile (beta) index bug:

    Sites designed for mobile devices in XHTML that are in google’s main cache and listed with verified mobile sitemaps in the google webmaster console do NOT appear in the google mobile (beta) index when viewed from a mobile device, but are in the main index. See my URL for an example. I see no way to nominate sites for inclusion in the mobile (beta) index, and see this as a bug.

  12. I’ve seen a small number of pages (from two separate sites) disappear from the Google index/cache. Previously in the Google index, some minor updates were made 1-3 months ago (e.g. changing a title or a few words of alt text for an image), was checking to see when the updates had been indexed. Was able to check date of cached versions until about 10 days ago (Google hadn’t seen the new content yet) – but since then, the pages have vanished.

    Searching for the URL, doing a site search or searching for a unique phrase from the pages all give same result – nothing for the pages in question are returned.

    No webmaster console warnings either (for the site I mainly work on).

    Am hoping this is just a temporary blip, but I’ve been saying that for about 10 days so far…!

    Howard

  13. Hey, Matt.
    I am quoting a guy who in his personal blog mentioned that google uses a couple of different words for “account” in Bulgarian. It is kind of confusing. I guess the translations come from different sources but using “сметка” for “account” is quite ridiculous. And using TWO different words when referring to the same thing is confusing.
    Could you have a look at that?
    Thank you.

    http://www.optimiced.com/bg/2007/10/23/google-account-vs-google-smetka/

  14. In most Google products I use the “My Account” link at top right always takes me back to my account which I believe is logical behaviour.

    In Analytics, clicking on My Account takes me to a page where I can edit my name and language, I can only guess specific to Analytics not the rest of my G account. I was going to write “I’ve never figured out how to get back to my real My Account page from Analytics” but I just now noticed that that Analytics page has a small text link to take you back to the real My Account page.

    Not sure if this is what you refer to as a bug, but it’s certainly a usability bug.

  15. Hi, I’ve got a few bugs I’ve encountered with Google Local Business;
    – company names not being displayed properly, eg. McVies WS being displayed as Mcvies Ws (this led to the removal of the listing for the client’s brand’s sake after several attempts at requesting it be fixed).
    – wrong URL’s being displayed against Google Local Business listings despite being correct in the actual listing (this has led me to remove the URL as I’d rather it not be displayed at all than be incorrect).
    – Listings taking more than 6 weeks to upload.
    – GLB click stats showing the same figures for the past x-months despite being “24hrs old”.
    Please feel free to get in touch for specifics relating to the above.
    Google does a great job as a SE but things like this, when reported and ignored, can really irk.
    Cheers, AL.

  16. Hello Matt,

    the currency conversion misses BAM and the former european currencies that got replaced by the Euro, (DEM, ESP, …)

    [100 HRK in EUR] works,
    [100 BAM in EUR] does not work
    [100 ESP in EUR] does not work

    René

  17. Bug or Feature, search and service such as Google Alerts should respect case (if enclosed in quotes or otherwise specifically requested). Search for “GPS” (as in Global Positioning System) and you get many results about British GPs (or GP’s) complaining about their work hours. This wastes my resources and yours.

    Nothing earth shattering, but respecting case would go a long way toward improving the user experience. And thanks for asking.

  18. Another Google Analytics usability issue:

    In most Google products, clicking the product icon in the upper left hand corner will take you back to the main page for that product. However, when I am using Analytics (ex. log-in and then click Filter Manager), clicking the product icon in the upper left-hand will actually log me out of Analytics and take me back to the log-in page (where I have to resubmit my password).

  19. Matt

    International news articles are being served to google.co.uk SERPS – they are totally irrelevant and are taking up a top 10 place in the organic listings.

    When you search “pages from the uk” the articles don’t show, but I don’t think they should show regardless, unless it is a uk article.

    Example http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=mortgages&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

    Rich

  20. when we search from Google.es “spanish courses in San Sebastian” the first result we can get is a web page with a .dk domain (result of Google Maps) which does not correspond to our main web page but to one of our affiliated agents in Denmark.I think that happens because .dk is a local domain (even though it is not .es) so it comes first than a .com domain.

    For instance if we search “company name + san sebastian” it appears .dk domain and .es domain but not the domain .com

    is this a bug?

  21. Google has bugs? Funny, I thought only cockroaches worked for Google??
    as Stan Lee used to say….
    ’nuff said….

  22. In Google Webmaster Tools while in Top search queries (with no search location filter) the links are not accurate all are linking to google.com instead of google.whats the top position for.

  23. I don’t know if this issue should be posted here, but sometimes my Google Calendar, which should be in Spanish, appears in japanese characters, and it stays that way for a couple of days. Then, suddenly, it all comes back to normal.

    This keeps happening now and then.

  24. Dave (original)

    I don’t eveny your job Matt, you ask for bugs and get all the idiots under the Sun replying with what THEY want.

  25. Google UK: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=something&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB

    When I scroll through the first ten results and end up at the bottom, I can use the blue-background search box there to refine my search query. Makes sense when you don’t like the first ten results. However, that one defaults to ‘worldwide’ i.e. forgets my CountryGB/UK preference. IMO it should carry on all GET parameters but q.

    Google UK:
    http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=sleep+apnea&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB
    Google’s language algo’s don’t take into account the official Oxford British spelling of words. “Sleep Apnea” yields suggested refinements but spelling it like “Sleep Apnoea” as is custom here doesn’t.

    Google UK (FF/Netscape/IE):
    http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=zzz-pap&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB
    Bizarrely, Google says “Results 1 – 10 of about 580,000,000 for zzz-pap. (0.24 seconds)” The results have nothing to do with the query and more results are reported than for “the” on “pages from UK only” Searching world wide for zzz-pap yields just 710 results, quite a contrast with 580 million in the UK! Very strange one and if you were to find the cause, I’d be happy to hear what it was.

    Analytics:
    When there are more than one website profile in an account, the drop-down at the top which allows you to jump between profiles has stopped working since roughly June this year. Whichever one you select, it always jumps to the top one. I use FF but remember it also happening in other browsers. Real PITA!

  26. A minor bug I’ve noticed, which can sometimes be frustrating.

    Whilst signed in to my google account, the first time I got to http://www.google.com/analytics or …/webmasters or …/adwords etc, I’m always taken to the iGoogle homepage.

  27. In the new My Maps feature there is a directory of public maps. One of them is for the London underground (heres your international slant).
    However if you click on a line it starts a tour along the map which you have little control over jumping from station to station. Can we have some proper controls please.

  28. When I open an Gmail email directly from the IGoogle homepage or from Google Desktop there is no option to achive the email once you have read it. You have to go to the inbox to achive it from there.
    A little time saver here would be appreciated.

  29. Matt,

    The bug concerns French Google.
    I think that Google is trapped by a webmaster when he puts a keyword in the URL.

    For example a webmaster just includes bookmakers’ names in domainnames only to have a very good ranking in Google for these keywords.

    http://www.bwin.foot-bookmaker.com
    http://www.bwin.paris-sportifs.tv
    http://www.betclic.foot-bookmaker.com
    http://www.betway.paris-sportifs.tv
    http://www.gamebookers.paris-sportifs.tv
    http://www.interpari.paris-sportifs.tv
    http://www.sportingbet.paris-sportifs.tv
    http://www.winamax.paris-sportifs.tv

    I’m sure that Google thinks that each website is owned by the company Bwin, Unibet, or Interpari etc etc

    So when you write on French Google Unibet or Bwin just see what happen

    http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=unibet&btnG=Recherche+Google&meta=

    http://www.unibet.foot-bookmaker is number 3

    http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=Bwin&btnG=Rechercher&meta=

    http://www.bwin.foot-bookmaker is number 2 and has a better ranking than Bwin.com !!!!!

    I think it could be great for Google to penalize websites which have a brand in their domainname and those whois shows that they are not owned by the company but by a ‘normal’ person.

    I am honnest I have a website which is opponent of these websites for same keywords. But I can’t understand why my website is penalized (I don’t cheat, I don’t sell or buy backlinks, I don’t cheat with my domainname) and why such websites have a great ranking in Google.

  30. Hi,

    I don’t know exactly if it’s a Google or an Opera bug. But most times such behaviour is caused by the site owners code – as far as I know.

    Browser: Opera 9.24 (identifying as Opera) and older versions, Linux

    – Go to the Google start page and click “Language Tools”
    – Opera crashes
    – Start Opera again and hit the “Continue where Opera crashed” Button
    – Click again “Language Tools”
    – It works
    – Close Opera and start from the beginning
    – Same procedure…

    It would be nice, if you could fix it.

    greetz
    Robert

  31. Can we assume that PR drops happening today are not bugs?

    Problogger PR4
    Copyblogger PR4
    SearchEngineJournal PR4

    It goes without saying that I feel there is a bug with your manual procedures on paid links. If I was using Google Checkout for payment for consulting services on my own site rather than a reputable escrow service I am sure there wouldn’t have been a problem.

  32. Google somehow managed to index the virtual folder “http://domain.tld/defaultsite”
    from my website. It’s implemented by my ISP by default, but I didn’t want it to be indexed.

    So, I blocked it with my robots.txt (webmastertools analysis: Blocked by line 12: Disallow: “/defaultsite”)

    I did a 301 redirect via .htaccess from “http://domain.tld/defaultsite” to “http://domain.tld/”

    Additionally, I removed “/defaultsite/” from G’s index (via webmastertools) successfully (it wouldn’t let me remove “/defaultsite” without the trailing slash).

    Although it did all this months ago and G crawled, spidered and indexed my website completely, “http://domain.tld/defaultsite” still shows up in the SERPs.

  33. Hi Matt, I haven’t comented for a while, but you’ve given me an opening…

    Ads showing up in Google News – especially from yahoo.

    I am showing the problem using one specific to the company i work for, but believe it must be a wider problem.

    I searched for Martin Lewis in Google News http://news.google.co.uk/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIC_en-GBGB223GB223&scoring=n&q=%22martin+lewis%22

    and found that a large number of news items appearing were not news items but yahoo ads that we have running syndicated on news sites, this is problematic as it makes searching for real news difficult and for real “non techie users” could mean that they regard the pages that they are going to as spam…

    Sorry about using my site, but i am sure you can see why this is a problem.

    Kind regards,

    Richard

  34. Here’s one: if I look up specific pages with internal or external links, “Our system is currently busy. Please try again in a few minutes.”

    It’s been doing this for the past few days.

  35. Hi Matt, the bug in gmail, when sending letter, googletalk disconnecting for 10 seconds.

  36. Google Images keeps producing random blank pages. Its hard to show An example as it does fluctuate frequently. Currently for example if I google image search ‘silverstall’ and then proceed to page 14 click on next and page 15 is blank. The images then continue on page 16. (Last week it happened on page 2-4).
    I am pretty sure the problem is not specific to our site as I have seen the same issue for all manner of search terms. e.g. image search ‘matt cutts’ and page 2 disappears.
    It might not be a bug as the user might just be catching it between updates however once confronted with a blank page I fear many users mistakenly think that is the end of the images for their search term.

  37. In Google SiteMaps I can’t to see my external links.
    “Our system is currently busy. Please try again in a few minutes.”

    This often happens

  38. Philippe Yergeau

    The major bug I still have to deal with is in “Google Maps”, which the postal code for the Quebec region is not updated.

    Last year (or nearly 2 years now), they were a lot of change in the Quebec rural system, changing street name, postal code, even annex small town to bigger town.

    Anyway, it’s really hard to make some map localisation with theses non-updated information.

    Thanks,

  39. Not sure if this can be classified as a bug, but it is something that I have noticed a while back, and can cause some problems regarding IDNs ( internation domain names ) in the Greek language, and how the URL is displayed in the Google results.

    In Greek, the letter “s” is Sigma “σ – lower case” and “Σ – upper case”.
    However, when a word in Greek ends with the letter Sigma “σ” is actually uses another way to display the letter – this is “ς”.

    So, for example, the word Skopelos in Greek, is actually spelt as Σκοπελος and not Σκοπελοσ.

    I have developed several websites with Greek IDN domains, and when these sites ( when the word ends in the letter Sigma ) appear in Google, the URL listed always uses the “σ” at the end of the correct “ς”.

    So, whereas the correct URL should be http://www.σκοπελος. , it is actually showing up on the results page as http://www.σκοπελοσ. which is not correct.

    Are there any plans in the pipeline to fix this small matter ???

    Again, sorry if this is not the type of “bug” you were asking about, but I do think that it is something that is worth addressing.

    Thanks

    Alex

  40. Hello Matt,

    I wote something, then got slapped in teh face by the spam protection field error, clicked back and my post was gone. I’ll keep it short.

    http://www.digitaaltvkijken.nl ranks 1st for “digital television” in Dutch (digitale televisie).

    Yahoo link search:
    http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu_U2Ph9HFDMApPxXNyoA?p=linkdomain%3Awww.digitaaltvkijken.nl+-site%3Awww.digitaaltvkijken.nl&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-471&fp_ip=NL&rd=r1&meta=vc%3Dnl

    Yes, these people annoy me and I think it’s a bug that algorythms don’t recognize a blatant domain/link spam like this. They were on 93k links 3 weeks ago and today they have 101k.

    Already reported to Google NL… hope they do something with it…

    Don’t mean to sound cross, just annoyed by these people and the fact that your blog nuked my post. 😛

    Keep up the good work!

    Kind regards,
    Guido

  41. Matt,

    Here’s one. When I log in to my Adwords account, then click on the Analytics tab at the top I am correctly sent to a page showing my website profiles – ok good. Then I select one of my sites in the drop down list near the top and that works. But, after this point, if I am done viewing the sites stats and want to look at another – and use the same drop down list to pick another site, it doesn’t work. I am always sent to the first one in the alaphabetically sort list. So I have to click another tab like Reports or My Account then back to the Analytics tab to select the site I want next. I haven’t tried testing this from the Anaytics login, only from Adwords.

    -Brent

  42. Hard to tell whose fault this is, but I’m having some sites with e.g. Chinese content and high-ranked search keywords for those are often not showing correctly in Google Analytics, even though I can display Chinese fine in other contexts on this PC (WinXP/ Firefox). Sometimes all I get in Analytics is stuff like “ƴͼ” or “×öãõ”. At other times e.g. Japanese and Chinese get through fine as keywords in Analytics, so it’s not a general issue.

    Not an international issue, but there was also another bug recently in Google Calendar… I wanted to change the time for an event. This was an existing ongoing event so I just changed the time for once, and got that usual “do you want to change this for every event in this series” dialog. No, I only wanted to change for this single even. But I tried several times, and it always ignored my new time setting, even though there were no visible error messages being sent by Calendar. I finally gave up and the event stayed the same. Again, not a general issue, at other times it works fine so…

    Google Maps as usual often don’t load, or take minutes to load from Germany. Sometimes tiles show “no data” even though at other times the same tiles contain data. Not sure if this is a local problem. (I’m always accessing the international Google Maps though.)

  43. I am unable to change sites in Google Analytics. In IE6, changing the dropdown combo box to a different site just takes me to the dashboard of my first website.

    To get to a different one, I have to click Analytics Settings and then click the link to the site I want to view. The drop down has been funky for about a month.

  44. Hi Matt,

    I am in Thailand and search for German results with http://www.google.de, for results from USA with http://www.google.de/ncr and for results from Thailand with http://www.google.co.th. But sometimes I become at http://www.google.co.th german results at first, when I search the next shop it’s this result not very helpful or some people here become results in thai with http://www.google.de. And with http://www.google.com/ncr it’s sometimes the first results with german, sometime with thai and sometimes really from USA.

    Thanks.

  45. http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=vin

    “vin” french for wine
    Show us a nonrelevant map of Wien city (austria) on first result.

  46. With more people using analytics and it’s “Source=” for tracking.. I’m seeing a lot of URLs show up in Google now with a “?Source=” in them. Granted, it’s a wrong usage by the webmasters… but enough are doing it that I can see it becoming a duplicate content / totally improper tracking issue.

  47. http://www.google.com/search?q=%28.*%3F%29

    Try this one… I think is a bug

  48. gmail won’t download on my Nokia E65 …

  49. Omar Yesid Mariño

    I live in Colombia now… many times when I type http://www.google.com in browser, it is redirected to http://www.google.com.ar (Argentina) when the correct thing must be http://www.google.com.co (Colombia)

  50. my own 2 cent…, the gmap mobile j2me won’t allow to add attachments, maybe is a missing feature, but i consider as a bug 😉

    Also, it’s restricted to @google, and it’s not open to GFD accounts, another missing future.

    So you ask for a bug, and i list all the missing feature, but hope still help.

  51. I have recently run into what I consider to be a bug in Google Checkout, which has prevented me from using it on three separate client ecommerce sites. For each site, we’re using a feed from UPS to get the shipping charge. Those feeds get passed to Google Checkout just fine. But no matter what we do (and we had three people spend three days trying to get this to work) it defaults to showing the fastest and most expensive shipping method first (and selected) We don’t want the angry calls from people who forgot to change it back to the standard shipping method, so we just decided not to use Google Checkout. Nothing we could come up with would change the sort order, and it’s not UPS, because it works fine in the shopping cart and with other payment providers.

  52. If your site is hosted in the USA, you won’t appear in your country’s search results. (Not a problem for Yahoo!, although I don’t know how they figured out I’m in the UK.)

    Google appears to use physical server location, which is silly given that the internet is an international medium.

    I geo-tag my sites e.g.

    It would be great if Google honoured one of these.

  53. Sorry! Here’s those tags without the brackets:

    meta name=”ICBM” content=”53.43491, -2.27434″
    META NAME=”geo.position” CONTENT=”53.43491, -2.27434″
    META NAME=”geo.placename” CONTENT=”Chorlton-cum-Hardy”
    META NAME=”geo.region” CONTENT=”GB-MAN”

    If Google honoured something like geo.position you could even hook up with Google Maps to see where the website owner was located.

  54. I’ve long noticed this as a bug with the Toolbar and now that you were nice enough to give me the chance to report it, I’m gonna take full advantage.

    Type the following into the Toolbar search:

    W32.proxy.ar (sans quotes)

    Then type it with quotes. Ideally, the “With Quotes” behavior should be the same on the Toolbar (or at least give us the ability to toggle this). It works as expected if you use the browser’s default search engine, but not within the Toolbar.

    This next one isn’t so much a bug as an “it would be nice”. I’ve noticed that, when you search for addresses within Google Maps, it pinpoints the location in the middle of the street instead of on the side of the street the building is actually on.

    For example:

    http://maps.google.com/maps?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLF,GGLF:2006-19,GGLF:en&q=17705+Leslie+Street,+Newmarket&um=1&sa=N&tab=wl

    This building is on the east side of the street (right about where the pointer shadow ends). It would be nice if a G map would indicate it.

    I think I’m done bitching for now. Thanks, Matt.

  55. Stephen Newton

    Testify brother 🙂 though its UK not GB and if anyone from Cisco read s this take note I had a aironet wireless controller insist on GB had great fun when i entered the correct cc code and it trued to set up the ap’s for some country in south America as a result.

    Having sad that today after just after I wrote my comment about geolocation I noticed that a .com hosted in Germany is now ranking in .co.uk.

    Has there been a geolocation related change to the algorithm ?

  56. Only thing I’ve noticed is with Google Webmaster Tools is when you go to “external links” and click on the number of links you have, instead of it going to a listing of backlinks it says the system is busy. Been going on for a few days now.

  57. You might want to check out what is going on here:

    http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww.ibm.com gives 307,000 results.
    http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww.ibm.com&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB gives 3740 results

    With most domains, you would expect the second search to give either around 307,000 results or around zero results … not somewhere in between.

    I can guess what is happening, but you should make sure…

    a) you know what is happening
    b) you want it to happen
    c) that it is working as you want it to

  58. Andy Beard

    All paid links are Spam-Bugs and need to be reported within Google Webmaster Tools 🙂

    But in your case, I would suggest filing a reconsideration request explaining your case to the friends at Google WebSpam Team. Give it a test drive, you have nothing to lose and everything to win 😉

  59. Spell check/suggestions in email search in Gmail.

  60. Matt-

    I found a bug when I got up this morning, just about every website I go to has dropped in PR by 2 or 3 points. What’s up with that? The toolbar is a joke and has been for a long time, when will you guys get rid of it?

    Jonny_no_pr

  61. Blogsearch sometimes returns results that include personalization for someone other than the searcher. For example, the link in the results may be displayed as something like “News for John Doe – http://www.etcetcetc.com.” This gives the impression that users’ personal data (search history, maybe?) is being indexed and displayed to the public. The issue has been reported to the Blogsearch team (see support incident #110120570), but with no apparent effect.

  62. I get this error at least once a day. I am not doing anything sneaky. Just doing site: link: inurl: intitle: types of searches.

    Why is that happening? I don’t have any viruses (I had the IT Dept check).

    David Payne
    Business Development
    OneCall

  63. Hmmm, looks like images aren’t allowed.

    Here is the link to the screenshot:
    http://www.brentdavidpayne.com/URaVirus.gif

    David Payne
    Business Development
    OneCall

  64. Bugs Bugs, Hmmm have not really seen any as of late. Only thing I have seen is a total lack of information on how to use google maps to create a map with multiple points of interest on it. I know it is possible to do as I have seen many but in the limited amount of time I have been able to devote to it I have not found the directions.

    And what is the deal with requiring a Google API key for things??

  65. I’ve noticed that, occasionally, Google SERPs will serve up the same exact listing twice. Like for example, the homepage listing will show up on page 1 and then again on page 2.

    Interestingly enough, if I change the search parameter from the default (10 results) to 20,50,100, etc.. the duplicate listing disappears. Also, it appears as if this only happens with urls that are also listed within Google Maps.

    I posed about this phenomenon at WebmasterWorld and got some confirmation of my suspicion: that there is some sort of glitch with universal search, which causes both the regular indexed version of a url and it’s corresponding Google Maps version to appear simultaneously.

    If you have questions or want a specific examples I can provide that as well.

  66. Jeremy, I’m in the meeting now, so I’ll ask about this one.

  67. Gmail does not download on my sprint phone. Any advise please ?

  68. I consider it a bug that when searching at google.com for an all-kanji term, even if the context is clearly Japanese (e.g. 筑波, the name of a city in Japan), it returns Chinese results.

  69. How about any of the tens of thousands of (actual) rss feeds of pages that have made it into the index and shouldn’t have. I get so sick of clicking on search results and seeing my browser fill with near jibberish (mixed text and tags). So do my Mom, Dad, sisters, brothers, and friends. This should be easy to eliminate since most have /rss/ in the url.

  70. This loss of the PR is for the algorithm or is human?

    Good strategy if your intention is to scare the people
    Good work

  71. Matt, you know we’ve been here before. People really want an override for non regionally specific domains. As more come online .mobi .biz .info .travel… .whatever, the requirement to decouple physical location for the local filter will increase.

  72. Bug 1:
    When I type in “google.com/adsense” in the address bar I am prompted with a SSL cert warning me “google.com” is not “www.google.com”. Google needs to redirect to “www.google.com/adsense” before turning on the HTTPS.

    Suggestion 2:
    I can’t spell analtics. So when I go to “google.com/analtics” I get a 404. So instead I preform a search query on Google for “analtics” and the first link is for “www.google.com/analytics” url. It would be great if google created a typo directory that redirect to the proper URL. I know you have a list misspellings for each word…

  73. signing out of adwords signs me out of igoogle.

  74. There is a serious bug with national characters decoding in Google Groups Usenet archives. This exists for months, I have reported it via normal support, sent the screenshots and details, but it seems to be ignored.

    If you visit the URL
    http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=ironia+ugryz%C5%82a&start=10&sa=N&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&
    you’ll notice many instances of incorrect decoding of diacritics (Polish in this case). See e.g. “Grali¶my w co¶”, which should in fact be “Graliśmy w coś”. This is probably related to treating the message as ISO-8859-1, while it’s ISO-8859-2 in fact. After clicking the link, the message text is decoded properly. However, looking at the message source here: http://groups.google.com/group/pl.pregierz/msg/38cf664af6e1a468?dmode=source again reveals the same problem with decoding.

  75. Not sure if this comes under your realm, but it is a SERP issue.

    The new Google web search help is at http://www.google.com/support/?ctx=web and has been for many years however at the bottom of every web SERP, you have a “Search Tips” link which goes to http://www.google.com/intl/en/help.html, the old Google help centre circa. 2004.

    Really, all the old content from the old help centre should be merged into the new one and the link updated (and the old help centre, which is (c) 2004, redirected).

  76. In Blogger it is very iretating to have to change the language setting every time I am logged in automatically or manually. It would be really nice if the language setting could also be saved in the cookie.

  77. Hi Matt

    When navigating to the login page of adwords and already signed in under my primary account I am always redirected at the login page to the page saying:

    Welcome to the Google AdWords interface.

    We noticed that you are an AdSense publisher. Were you trying to log in to your AdSense account instead?

    It would be nice to be able to sign in as a different user, as some people have more than one adwords account. Even a simple link “No Thanks Sign In As A Different User” would be useful.

    Cheers
    Aidan

  78. Hugo Guzman, I’ve noticed that as well recently, and I believe there’s something in the pipeline to take care of that. Thanks for mentioning it though!

  79. Sam Sondelila, Google has been getting better at processing RSS feeds recently, and you shouldn’t see them showing up in our search results as often going forward. If you see specific examples, feel free to post them here..

  80. It is noticeable how Google Brasil (www.google.com.br) is much more vulnerable to spamming than Google in english. Making tests for some important search terms (which includes my wife’s name!) one can find very well-ranked crappy pages all around. Is there a difference between the spam-detection technologies employed in Google U.S. and other systems? Or are brazilian spammers more witty than american ones? It’s hard to believe the second theory…

    Best wishes,

  81. Personalised Google Home (Australia) can display a theme at the top, and the image varies with the time of day. I have the tea house theme selected. At present, it’s 9am, but the theme displayed would be more suited to night-time. The image displayed at night time (my time) has the sun in it!

    This feature has previously worked properly. I have checked to see that the time zone in “My Account” is set correctly.

  82. Hi Matt,

    Thanks for promoting Serbia… ” If we don’t handle the top-level domain of Serbia correctly..”
    Yes. You don’t handle the top-level domain of Serbia correctly. Lunov should be the top search result when googling Serbia. It’s not a Bug, it’s that your servers are outdated for webpages likes ours. Namely Google’s robot (and Yahoo & MSN ) are unable to analyse our content bringing 31 pages in one page. It’s quite not a problem now as Lunov’s configuration is unique, but it could be a Big problem for your system in a near future (something like a streisand effect you know).

    Thanks again for promoting Serbia!

  83. Matt, re: the rss feeds, just a quicky I ran across moments ago – wordpress rss feeds are still in the google results. To bring a bunch of examples up quick search for:

    inurl:/wordpress.com/feed

  84. Don’t know if you were looking for this kind of things, but Google.com redirects me to some other language host when I’m not logged in (or don’t have a cookie set). Even though I have English set as my preferred language in the browser. I have no idea what this switch is based on than doing some half-assed IP scan and guessing on where I’m from [and apparently what language I want to browse in], but it shouldn’t. Accept-Language exists for a reason in the HTTP protocol.

  85. Not sure if this is a bug but I have seen it a fews time a on diff searches. When you do a search on “forex review” you get the same site for 1 and 2 sorry I don’t recall the others off the top of my head.

    cheers

    kris

  86. Good news on the RSS feeds. I’ve always nofollowed and robots.txt blocked them not for any PageRank funneling exercise but because I hate clicking one in the search results and I didn’t want my visitors to have to suffer that awful back clicking inducing trauma.

  87. Check SERPS of http://www.listenarabic.com , most pages include Arabic , English an French titles but Google decided to begin the title SERP by … 3 points. Any specific reason for this issue that occurs since beginning of October?

    Thanks Matt.

  88. I can cite many examples when I try to see the cache of a webpage via Google TB, it shows no cache, while clicking the cache link off the SERPs, it shows.

  89. International bug – Google is DOUBLE INDEXING some websites. Here is an example.

    Google.co.uk
    Search term: sheffield jobs
    look at result 8 and result 11

    http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=sheffield+jobs&meta=

    http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sheffield+jobs&hl=en&pwst=1&start=10&sa=N

    If this is a bug it needs fixing as a double indexed seearch engine is not a good thing! cheers

  90. Neither are bugs, though I feel that they’re worth a mention.

    Firstly – UK spellings, on Google.co.uk when you serach for a query using a UK version it’ll correct you with the US spelling.

    OptimiSation – Did you mean: optimization? NO I’m just English! :p

    I don’t notice it with colour/color though?

    Secondly, in webmaster tools, it would be really good to specify which local version of Google a site should appear in. You guys seem to be getting better recently at deciding on the correct local serach a site should be in, but it would be great to have a manual override that we could use.

  91. Matt,

    I’m not sure if this is a bug, missing functionality, or just wishful thinking on my part, but here’s the question (and I’ll be blogging about this too): In 2002 I started tedmasterweb.com. It was my professional face on the web. In 2004 I became a partner in a small IT firm in the Canary Islands. Some time around the beginning of 2007 I migrated tedmasterweb.com to a subdirectory of clevernet.biz (clevernet.biz/tedmasterweb/) to see if I could improve the page rank of clevernet.biz since that is now my primary interest (and because I prefer to manage just one web site, not two).

    I employed a 301 redirect, as recommended by you and others as best I could, but I did not ask the people linking to tedmasterweb.com to update their links. Now, tedmasterweb.com has a page rank of 0 and there did not appear to be any noticeable increase in the page rank for clevernet.biz.

    I realize this isn’t exactly a search-related issue and I’m probably sounding like a whiner (but hey, it’s cool, it was an experiment, after all), but thought you might be able to shed some light on why the page rank for tedmasterweb.com did not follow the move.

    Thanks in advance,

    Gustave S-R

  92. The ‘did you mean’ mispelling function on Google search does not work correctly on Google.co.uk – It is american focussed. For example, in the UK we spell optimisation with an ‘s’ but if you type this into google.co.uk i get the message ‘did you mean optimization?’. This happens with many other keywords.

  93. Richard Hearne (RedCardinal)

    Is there any official change on geo-location criteria for sites?

    Some reports of people hosting in US with .com TLD and appearing in country level searches e.g. ‘pages from UK’ and ‘pages from Ireland’.

  94. Traveling in Mexico with only a Dell Axim x51v for wi-fi access.
    Google mobile assumes Spanish based on my ip address and provides no way to change language to English on mobile interface – same with Google mobilizer..

  95. And this?

    http://google.com/views?hl=en&q=+linux+view%3Atimeline&btnG=Google+Search

    Linux in 1911, and the first person to have set foot on the Moon was in 1492. 😉

  96. Please make it easier for sites to target specific pages to specific countries. My client is a large company that does business worldwide. It is ridiculous that they would need to acquire all of the foreign domains and host their site in multiple locations to be considered relevant for that region. It would be nice to have a meta tag that could denote where each page is targeted so that the UK pages aren’t showing up in the US SERPS and vice versa.

    The biggest issue here is that there are a lot of different English, Spanish, French……..speaking countries however; my client’s pricing and sales offices are different for each country. This is especially problematic with brand terms.

    This would be a fantastic fix and certainly make the search experience better for international searchers.

    Thanks for taking the time to address this.

  97. There’s a strange mapping bug: go to maps.google.com, and search for vancouver, washington.
    in the address field, type in 8100 ne parkway drive, vancouver, wa
    hit enter.
    it comes up with a result,
    Address: 8100 NE Vancouver Plaza Dr
    Vancouver, WA 98662
    Make this my default location

    which is due south of the street it’s supposed to show. the information box that pops up is usually covering the street it’s supposed to show.

  98. link:www.example.com vs the inbound links shown from webmaster tools. Is the disparity on purpose or is it a bug?

  99. This is not the bug I am discussing as I got better platform to speak some thing about google. Gmail is giving enough space to store mail but if there is an option to take backup of all the mails time to time just clicking one button is easier because some day some how my mail id crashed or may be due to any reason banned my all important data get lost. So getting good backup system of mail will be one of the best option I hope.

  100. Subikar, I agree that a one-click backup would be really nice. You can use the POP download feature to back up your email, but it’s not a brain-dead easy kind of thing. I like that the new Apple OS will include really easy backup.

    Errioxa, What we’re looking for is years mentioned in the documents. That’s always going to be a little noisy and is to be expected. I take your point that it would be nice if the proximity of the “year mention” to the user’s word in the document would be taken into account.

    Hey all, just to let you know, another Googler offered to prowl through the comments and try to submit obvious bugs to the right teams. I really appreciate everyone that has commented with bugs.

  101. Probably a well known one but I did this search earlier this week….

    Google search for “-2147467259” (presumably other negative numbers as well, but I didn’t check them all ;-).

    Clearly it should either return all results for “-2147467259” or results not containing “2147467259” (of which I suspect the Internet has many billions).

    Yes it is 0x080004005 (the COM object didn’t report its error because the programmer couldn’t be bothered) in disguise as a decimal.

    But the result is you get a handful of answers, searching for “2147467259” gets you more results for “-2147467259” so it isn’t a good search for “-2147467259”, but all the results you do get have “2147467259” in, so it isn’t excluding them either.

    Okay maybe I could have phrased the search a bit better (“214767259 site:microsoft.com” for example), but it wasn’t the magic “do what I mean” that Google usually achieves.

    Do I get pagerank/job/meal at Google office or something for bug reports, or just a better search engine? 😉

  102. Thanks for the update Matt. But the thing is that I am developer so I know different way to do the backup. But the main concern to those who are the layman and have little knowledge on computer but running a big business all the important mails are maintain there in google mails. This will be helpful much for them that I think.

    And again thanks for answering the quries. 🙂

    Subikar

  103. Matt: This has nothing to do with bugs but have you seen the latest toon pic….vis a vis PR reductions.

    http://www.seorefugee.com/seoblog/2007/10/24/lorena-cutts-bobbitt

    Its something else to be “the face of google”

  104. Quote: lunov Said,
    October 24, 2007 @ 4:34 pm

    Hi Matt,

    Thanks for promoting Serbia… ” If we don’t handle the top-level domain of Serbia correctly..”
    Yes. You don’t handle the top-level domain of Serbia correctly. Lunov should be the top search result when googling Serbia. It’s not a Bug, it’s that your servers are outdated for webpages likes ours. Namely Google’s robot (and Yahoo & MSN ) are unable to analyse our content bringing 31 pages in one page. It’s quite not a problem now as Lunov’s configuration is unique, but it could be a Big problem for your system in a near future (something like a streisand effect you know).

    Thanks again for promoting Serbia! – End Of Quote

    I apolozige for the (mis)leading link.Here it is http://www.lunov.com/Serbia-Macedonia-Montenegro.htm

    Please, take a look.
    Thanks.

  105. Jack from the Netherlands

    When translating a website using Google Translate, where -on the original website- plain text with several paragraphs is placed between “PRE”-tags, all whitelines between paragraphs are removed in the resulting page.

    Google Translate changes the formatting of the original text. The result is a pretty unreadable mess of very long lines of text and a huge horizontal scrollbar.

    Pls. contact me for more details if desired.

  106. There’s a big problem with googlebot bandwidth usage ( in france ).

    GGbot is crawling very fast since 4 or 5 days, making as a “slashdot effect”.

    French hosting service “OVH” is almost out of order, are there any problems with ggbot settings ?

    Excuse my poor english, I’m french 🙂

  107. Bugs? I would say so. All those organic creatures running around the Googleplex pretending to be experts in their field and getting paid for it. Especially when they make the kinds of decisions they did this week with Google’s most recent slapdown on paid links when everyone knows that Google continues to maintain paid links on it’s site..

    We don’t tell you how to run your business, do we? Maybe we do and you just don’t listen.

    Bad form Google!

  108. This ‘bug’ relates to Google Australia (assuming is the same for other country specific googles).

    Whenever you do a search, EVEN if you don’t specify ‘Pages from Australia’ a disproportionate number of pages returned are from Australia. This occurs across a broad range of searches.

    The geotargetting is ‘subtler’ than that which you get when you specifically ask for geotargetted results, but it is definitely there.

    I don’t want to see geotargetted results if I haven’t asked for them – I don’t want to have to keep using an overseas proxy to see what the rest of the world sees.

    doc

  109. There seems to be a Google PageRank bug, my blog has reduced to PR3.

    To eat and drink I had to sell a few links, now I will have to sell my body!

    🙂

  110. Click the Next link at the bottom of the page. It should take you to page 11, but instead loads page 1. Eeenteresting.

  111. doc, why not use Google.com and not Google.com.au ?

    Doubt this is a bug, rather a useful feature.

  112. I’m seeing a bug on “bleu widget” a domain (index) is on every serp page on place 10.

    So on start=20 its on 29, start=30 its on 39 etc. It goes on to start=170

  113. I don’t know if it can be call as a bug, but..,
    If you go to the spanish version of Google Zeitgeist you only get until November 2005 list.
    http://www.google.es/press/zeitgeist.html

    You have to go to the International Site of Google Zeitgeist to get an updated list of Top Gaining Queries in Spain.
    http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/intl-zeitgeist.html#es

  114. Matt, you or someone else over at Google needs to make a statement regarding the recent TBPR drops. (Yes its off-topic, but a few other people already brought this up). I personally think its bad PR (public relations). If you want to send a strong message, you need to penalize link sellers’ rankings and traffic, not just what they see in the toolbar. Otherwise people won’t take you seriously.

  115. Seemingly related to my earlier comment:

    http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=http&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB

    (Almost) All of the 141 million results are only listed because of this sentence in your cache header:

    “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: http”

    Surely, Google can remove http and www from the links for the sake of indexing and ranking. That way, real pages about the HTTP protocol can be ranked first page in Google UK, not millions of pages which happen to have http ina link pointing to them.

  116. Not sure if you are still checking the comments for this post, but I have an interesting bug that I’ve been trying to work out for several weeks now and no one can seem to help me with figuring out just exactly why I’m seeing these results.

    The query in question is:

    “info:www.thedevlounge.com”

    That shows the results for another domain (www.casadelewis.com) on a completely different server and completely different IP address than my domain. What’s more is using the webmaster tools, a lot of the keyword phrases it says I’m ranked for, I can’t find myself anywhere on that page for those keywords (is this normal?), and I’m wondering if this has anything to do with it. Also if you try:

    “cache:www.thedevlounge.com”

    It shows the page for casadelewis.com and has it as recently spidered, but there is no way that that page could have been spidered in association with my site. I have a few ideas of why it’s doing this, but have no clue how to resolve it. I’ve sent in emails to google on multiple occasions with no response, so I’m attempting to see if you can give me any insight on this problem.

    Thanks tons in advance,

    Nick Shepherd

  117. Dave (Original) google.com redirects to google.com.au from Oz, so you’ve got no choice.

    re: useful feature – absolutely agree – in which case why have the ‘show local results only’ feature when it’s going to be geotargetted to an extent regardless.

    It isn’t really a complaint or a bug, rather just something that seems quite wacky.

    doc

  118. google reader search and non-ascii-letters:

    [Ivanić] finds articles that include “Ivanić”
    [Ivanic] does not return articles that include “Ivanić”

    whereas web search would return websites that contain “Ivanić” using either search (sometimes the result order differs, sometimes not)

    but there is no easy way to enter those specialletters with a american keybord in google reader…

    René

  119. I’d like Google to address higher SERP’s by registering 50+ domains with different addresses, IP’s, etc then cross linking the “affiliated” sites with the ecommerce sites to get high rankings. One search result has 5 of the top 15 spots (including 2 of the top 5) using this tactic.

  120. Hi Matt!
    Two bugs:
    1. The following characters:
    % and $ and !
    return no results when searched alone or with keywords.
    2. No feedback is presented when no results are returned. (No explanation of what made that query invalid, etc.)

    Examples:
    “&!” returns results with names that include an ampersand. The expected result would include “Yotsuba&!” a book title including that string.*

    “$BIGNUM” returns no results, even in google groups, when I would expect at least one result returned for alt.sysadmin.recovery.

    “DNA$” returns results about DNA. The expected result might be equivalent to “dnas”, Sony’s playstation security protocol.

    Suggested fixes:
    List of forbidden characters in the advanced search help.
    List escape sequences to use, and/or provision of escape sequences.
    Provide feedback when no results are returned.

    *a very cute, innocent manga. Recommended reading..

  121. I’ve noticed a bug with the Google Toolbar for Firefox. When I enter a keyword and click “Search Site,” it works right the first time. However, after that, the toolbar erroneously prepends “site:” to every search I do until I restart Firefox.

  122. Matt:

    I am not sure if this is a bug but the results for Google UK appear to only list UK sites when selecting search the web. I thought that searching sites from the UK should produce these kind of results but it seems that is not the case. Almost identical results are obtained when the search is performed for the entire web or just UK sites. Is this releveant? Why have 2 search options with identical results? If the design is to allow UK sites exclusive preference when searching the web why bother having the UK exclusive radio button?

  123. Richard Hearne (RedCardinal)

    http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=free+games&btnG=Google+Search&meta=cr%3DcountryIE

    Country search for ‘free games’ returns a .com site hosted in the US for #1 & #2. Where’s the relevancy there?

    Not like there aren’t enough results on .ie domains alone:

    http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=free+games+inurl%3A.ie&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryIE

    Never mind sites physically hosted in Irish IP space.

  124. Hey Matt,

    this is not about bug but I would like to thank you for mentioning Serbia. It may help Serbia to get more visibility 😀

    Keep up doing good work,
    Alex

  125. Would say an american site with american ip returning first for a specific item in a country filtered results page{ say filtered for ireland} be regarded as an international bug , or just as relevant to the query ?
    Kind regards Mick

  126. We need more data from the “Allowed Urls” feature.

    How many hits have been on the link (1 or 1000)

    Unless you know then how can you decide its a ‘safe’ link, or an attack on your adsense?

    Automatically include all google data centers and regional search engines.

  127. Yes, the site I maintain (www.legionofmarytidewater.com) is listed as a PR 0. That is down from a PR 4. I don’t have any paid links on or to the site. This must be some sort of bug?

  128. Dave (original)

    Dave (Original) google.com redirects to google.com.au from Oz, so you’ve got no choice

    I can confirm that is NOT true.

  129. Sites appearing in both google maps and google search results.

    Effectively, gives that site 2, or even 3 positions in the top 10.

    For that matter, the fact that google map results in search don’t ever change order, and are not based on worth.

    IN australia, it is especially bad.

  130. In Google tools, there is nothing for the many site webmaster.

    eg.

    a. Search for a domain…. need to scan through them.
    b. Verify ALL sites.
    c. Load sitemap location for ALL sites.

  131. I can confirm that is NOT true.

    I can confirm it’s definitely true, and by design. If you don’t want the country specific redirect, access http://www.google.com/ncr

    If you’re in Australia and not being redirected then I suppose it’s a legitimate issue. I’d guess the problem is caused by outdated geographic data.

  132. Thanks Peter – yup – Occasionally you’ll happen across an IP that doesn’t automatically redirect (especially if you’re with Optus who recently started using a big slab of previously unallocated IP addresses) but in the majority of cases you’ll be redirected.

    I notice Frederick Gimino (above) raises the same issue with Google UK (ie getting geotargetted results whether you ask for it or not) – so whilst it is probably totally by design it is still a little unusual.

    Thanks Peter for the link to http://www.google.com/ncr – that’s useful.

    Cheers,

    Matt

  133. Cindy Turrietta

    Hi Matt: Does the “supplemental” query we talked about at SES SJ count? I recall you saying it was a “bug”… ; )

  134. Matt. Chatting to my team something that definitely appeared to be a bug was that one of them was searching on Google and got a Squid Proxy http://www.squid-cache.org/ error come back in the results page? We don’t use Squid and doubt British Telecom do, so figure it must have been coming from Google infrastructure? Perhaps something worth checking at your end.

  135. Hi Matt,

    The currency conversion in french has a little bug. For example : http://www.google.ca/search?hl=fr&q=50+dollars+canadiens+en+dollars+am%C3%A9ricains&meta= won’t return the result of the conversion. If I use http://www.google.ca/search?hl=fr&q=50+dollars+canadien+en+dollars+am%C3%A9ricain&meta= instead, it will work. So, the first query do not work because of the “s” at the end of canadiens and américains. In french, adjective related to a noun that is plural (in this case dollars) will take an “s” at the end. It would be great if your search engine could understand the right syntax.

    Best regards,
    Guillaume Voyer.

  136. All my sites have been hit heavily on the toolbar PR droping from 5 to 3 or 4 to 3 a couple from 3 to 1 and I don’t sell links. I have advertisers, you click a link, make a purchase and I earn some cash but then isn’t this what its all about?

    I work hard on the Internet, several hours a day trying to make a living and if this tb decrease is leading to a drop in SEO then I am going to have serious financial losses.

    I can accept gentle and slight changes, a fall of a few places or a rise but what I find hard to accept are massive changes that punish the innocent. Everyone at Google who are responsible for the big decisions need to realise that they are playing with peoples livliehoods. Can we have some sort of announcement, do those that have big losses on TB PR need to brace themselves for major search term losses?

  137. Matt,

    On the webmaster tools request reconsideration page, it strikes me that the page should have a section for those who have NOT violated the quality guidelines in the past, but who believe Google THINKS they have. I have never sold a text link ad in my life, yet I have reason to believe (cf http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/10/27/the-google-page-rank-pendulum-swings-again/) that I’ve just been penalized for selling them.

    Maybe this is way out of line and related to the whole business of feeling like I’m not getting the rank I deserve, but it seems to me your reconsideration page shouldn’t force a confession before letting one back in church and should admit the possibility that the church may have erred.

  138. I can confirm that is NOT true.

    You can do that all the way from Alaska, Dave? 😉

  139. In Google webmaster tools, it says that my index page was last crawled Jan 29th. That’s not anywhere correct. Googlebot crawls it almost everyday. No errors show up in Google Webmaster Tools and no other search engines have problems crawling the page.

    The site has been around for more than 2 years but was suddenly dropped from Google’s index a few weeks ago. I strongly suspect the two things are related.

  140. Embed maps are really slow on Firefox,and not on internet explorer.At east, in Spain.

    There is another problem with Sitemaps. I have a redirection to any url’s, for example: http://www.mapfactory.net/red/map_factory_redir.php?i=1&id=230 is redirecting to: http://www.casas.nl/ I’m the owner of mapfactory and my sitemaps webmasters tool is showing me all http://www.casas.nl/ For me, is fantastic, but I guess it’sa bug.

    Isaac

  141. Matt:

    In my adsense account, under diagnostics, I see several non-existent urls that appear to have been blocked on my domain. Problem is, they are all from China, (.cn url extensions) and they do not exist.

    I’ve written google about this but gotten no response.

    Here are the non-existent urls that is listed in my account. There presence signaled a huge drop in adsense impressions at the same time so it’s not a coincidence:

    http:/ / gas-furnase. cn/ feed/
    http:/ / 2flash-games. cn/
    http:/ / valeentines. cn/ feed/
    http:/ / schoolshooting. cn/ feed/

  142. Analytics > Map Overlay > Detail Level: City
    The city of Rome (Italy) does not exist! A city called Augusta (???) is displayed instead of Rome.

  143. Is this a bug or a way to cheat the system using multiple IP’s?

    http://www.invoicedealers.com shows up when searching “Only from Australia” when they are clearly US based and not relevant to people here. This is the only example I’ve seen of this…

    Thanks

    Dave

  144. my website has a link from http://www.domain.GOV.tr (turkey), got it few months ago and still has it, its not nofollow but Goole webmaster tools does not show it.

  145. Not sure if this is a “bug” but it’s a problem.

    Doing a search on Google Brasil. http://www.google.com.br/

    Do a search for “cd usado comprar sao paulo” Basically Used Cd’s in Sao Paulo.

    The first several pages of results are dominated by viva street. They are using a combination of sub-domains and directories in an effort to dominate the results. Isn’t there a better way? Is this correct? It doesn’t seem like this use of both sub domains and directory structure helps the user.

  146. b2b PR is updated and changed on a constant basis.

    Just because it has appeared in the form of a little green bar increase recently doesn’t mean it’s only just come into existence. If folks with proxies are now 301’ing little green bars across to their mates then they’re bloody idiots – that would raise red flags acres in size.

    Reverse the PR update? dude – again – it’s not an update, it’s an export. Use webmaster tools to report them as spammers and be done with it – this thread is about bugs not spam.

  147. hmm.. ok dokey.

    Nah this update see’s original content penalised and hijacked content rewarded its fucked up, you know it you fucking little cunt dockarl and I know it

    PR is mostly to do with the links coming to your site. If the proxies are getting more incoming link action then it’s quite possible they’re also involved in some form of link trading designed to manipulate the system – again, something a spam report will help.

    thousands of innocent websites been caught up in your hijacking an if you ever talk to me again you little cunt

    My hijacking? champ – I’m a blogger that owns 3 websites, not the owner of an evil black hat empire. Chill out.

    you little cunt dockarl I will promise you I will hunt down your parents and suffer them the sins you will die for.

    In my jurisdiction that would be considered a threat and your hunting down days will probably be short if you make threats like that.

    Erm and them some dockarl you piece of shit

    umm.. yep. I reiterate. This isn’t a bug – this is a case of spam, and it doesn’t automatically become worse overnight when Google has a PR export. Report the spam, if necessary also file a DMCA report and take a deep breath.

  148. dockarl: did I miss something? Who exactly are you responding to there? That almost sounds keniki-esque, but I can’t find the original stuff you’re quoting.

  149. Hi Multi-Worded Adam – the commenter was pointing out that a proxy of (probably) their page had a higher PR than the original since the latest PR export, suggested that the PR export should be reversed as the future of the Google index was in danger and then went off the deep end when I responded with a contrary point of view.

    Matt banned him really quickly because he also had a go at some other people on this site and really took it way too far.

    doc

  150. A Firefox Browser sync problem. I typically have 3 windows with app., 15 tabs open in each. When the plugin during the startup of Firefox decides that there is no connection to the internet and asks you to reconnect and the “Enter password” window opens, then all tabs are empty of their content that was there before. No URLs in the navigation line, no content shown in the browser. You lose all the urls and content of all the tabs, except for the tab which is open when this happens. This is seriously annoying.

  151. I notice some paid links on television station websites seem to influence Google SERPs quite a bit. For instance, wnbc.com and local6.com have links for “medical supplies”, “mesothelioma”, “cosmetic dentist”, etc.

  152. Matt,
    I have a google base rss input feed (http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/googlebase.php) which expired today (Oct 29th, 2007) and the main page of my Google Base Items shows them under inactive, yet when I go to the “Bulk upload files” page, both versions of the feed -I’ve had to load it under 2 separate file names now as I was having trouble loading the original – show active, one with 55 items and one with 51 items. My account is dave.halliwill at gmail. This problem appears to have existed for a while. Not a big deal but I thought you might want to know.

  153. Some Brazilian sites that do not use the .br TLD, when hosted at international servers, are now show on “Show pages from Brasil”. One examples is my site. http://www.whiplash.net. Its the biggest rock/heavy metal site in Brasil (first result for “heavy metal” when someone searchs from Brasil) but do not appear on the search results if the “shows page from brasil” is selected…

  154. When I sign out of blogger (blogspot.com) it signs me out of gmail as well as analytics. REALLY annoying.

  155. Hi Matt. I’m not sure if this is a bug, but it certainly is a bit strange.
    My website has been ranking in top 5 for some time on a couple of search terms on http://www.google.dk. One day I dropped to positions between 300 and 500. Maybe I did something against the guidelines, so I adjusted some things. After a few weeks I found myself in top 50. A while later I was back in top 5 – but only for one or two days. Maybe the website doesn’t qualify for more than top 30-50, but I wonder why it suddenly came up in top 5 for two days?

  156. http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=nottingham&btnG=Suche&meta=lr%3Dlang_de

    Why are ALL 10 results wikipedia??? And they’re not even German, pages in German was selected.

  157. Matt,

    Part bug, and part spam. It seems people are using the Creative Commons badge to spam the search engines and get into a search for Creative Commons material — but on their website is both a CC license and “all rights reserved” while some true Creative Commons licensed material is not displaying.

    For a spam result, search for searchengineworkshops and restrict the search to Creative Commons licenses. One of the results is http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/creative-commons.html, which includes both a CC badge and a very strongly All Rights Reserved notice.

    Now search for “Class Discussion About Playing Ayiti: The Cost of Life” and restrict the search to Creative Commons licenses. The source material, which is CC licensed, does not display, though a blog discussing the source material does display (source is at TakingITGlobal). The TIG site does have a copyright notice, but that appears to be for the site code and not the contents. The TIG site is in the regular index.

  158. Irritating localisation bug:

    Dashboard is translated Instrumentpanel on Swedish sites. Correct if you are talking about the dashboard of a car, but plain stupid for a website.

    WordPress has the Swedish translation Panel for the same word, which is much more generic.

  159. I think this latest toolbar update was overtly aggressive. We have a site with a lot of unique content and no link buying and all links natural that was hit very hard on the PR side. We cannot work out why and have been through everything – we created a tool where lots of people link to it and can think this was the cause of it and Google not manually inspecting sites that get flagged, instead just letting the algo do the work.

    We are very disappointed as we have worked hard to stay within Google webmaster guidelines and there has been no link buying.

    The concern is that if you are going to tighten your algorithm then there needs to be safeguards in place that don’t just simply penalize a website without some kind of manual inspection.

  160. I wish Yahoo and MSN had this post becuase their lack of geo-targeting is the main reason they do not do well and not the well paid managers.

  161. google is occasionally indexing pages w/ utf-8 encoding of the ampersand:

    example:
    http://www.google.com/search?q=site:phpnuke.org+amp+file+article&num=50&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=VXk&filter=0

    In this case, it ends up displaying results not matching the particular article… may cause some duplicate content issues.

    PHP-Nuke
    Please read the full article for more info.” … Player config in language file and files add, modify, delete the nuke administration. …
    phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2417 – 59k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

  162. btw, there should be amp before the file and sid in my example above but they were automatically displayed correctly

  163. I would consider this a bug. My tudefitness site appears to be suddenly banned and, after going thru it, it dawned on mme it may have been crawled when my host – Hostgator – made some change and all my include php files needed to be changed. Every link in them showed the same error message throughout my site.

    This is a site nearly 10 years old with a lot of links to it and a lot of visitors and a lot of good content I have built over that time. I think this is a bug in the system. Anyone with the same problem being crawled at that time could have the same results and have no warning. The engines should see the word error message and know there is a problem.

    I applied for reconsideration but am wondering if you get it if you lose the age of your site?

    A bug like this – would anyone agree it is a bug or at least a flaw – can destroy a business.

  164. Is a Google News bug OK?

    Within the archive when changing the ‘Recent’ values (hour, day, week, month) the “Results 1 – 10 of about 19,551” count does not seem to be working correctly. I am looking at a [source:guardian_unlimited] search.

  165. Hi Matt,

    Weird one this. Intermittent – I cannot replicate it precisely but if I go from iGoogle homepage into my account then into webmaster tools – sometimes when I go back to my account (to select a different tool like adwords or whatever) – it changes language to Greek (it looks greek!) I have to remember which location/page/link to get to to select language on to get back to english. Its really annoying and I can’t replicate it all the time. Started happening about 4 months ago.

  166. Strange…..

    Problem or bug in google.pt ?

    url have a title like this… “Samsung SyncMaster 3Ne …….”
    Search for “3ne” in google.pt Portugal – 52results – are ok
    Search for “Samsung SyncMaster 3Ne” – 1 result only, but url is missing
    Search for “Samsung 3Ne” – 11 results are ok
    search for “syncmaster 3ne”” – results url missing.

    a problem or policy i don’t know, i know if someone type complet name with 3 words can’t get results

  167. Hi Matt,

    Knowing that this is an “old” post I’m still hoping that you will take the time to follow up on this issue.

    I have also heard from you before that the number of results returned on site: searches are “a bit from the beaten path” and therefor not a priority for Google.

    My bug report (or question if you like) is concerning the site: search on some swedish sites.

    For example a search for site:www.alltforforaldrar.se, if searching on google.se “on the web” will return approx. 105 000 results while the same search “in swedish” will return approx 5 440 000 results.

    Why such a big variation between the two searches?

  168. Hi Matt,

    Little late but I’ve got the same problem as Jeremy with mobile content appearing in the main results index.

    about a year ago I disallowed /forum/*wap2* type urls in robots.txt with the following rule

    User-agent: Googlebot
    Disallow: /forum/*wap2*

    I do allow it for google mobile with

    User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
    Allow: /forum/*wap2*

    However over the past week or so, for some reason google has replaced pretty much all my indexed pages with wap2 style ones, eg

    http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/…=175725.0;wap2

    Of about 198K results for site:www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/ only about 95 are not wap2 style pages ::)

    Webmaster tools suggests the rules should be applied correctly

    Normal googlebot reports

    http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/…=175725.0;wap2 Blocked by line 14: Disallow: /forum/*wap2*

    googlebot mobile reports

    http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/…=175725.0;wap2 Allowed by line 36: Allow: /forum/*wap2*

    But the actual SERPS show it’s clearly not doing what it should and is ignoring the rules http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en…e+Search&meta=

  169. Hey, Matt
    The supplemental result search doesn’t works. Using it was useful for determining if a site had internal architecture issues.

  170. Hi
    a bit of a moan about webmaster tools, the index stats are not very good. link: – it takes months to update and it s doesn’t show all the backlinks, related: – it takes even longer.

  171. One thing I have noticed since the recent link jooce selling milarky is that a lot of sites are now faking their ToolBar PageRank, using meta refreshed, page redirects and stuff. I don’t know if it a bug in the toolbar, but shouldn’t toolbar be able to pick up on these fakers?

  172. Hi, why was searchandgo.com stripped to PR3 from 5’s, 4’s and 6’s? there is no link buying, and the largest percent of links are earned. We were quite surprised at this and are still wondering why the penalization of PR?

    This is a fair bit aggressive, considering the site is content rich and developing applications we can’t see why this would be a cause for concern for Google. It appears quite nefarious on your part.

  173. An annoying problem for Australia (and I’m assuming New Zealand and Asia) is that we can’t access “today’s” data until it clicks over a new day in Mountain View. We are 19 hours ahead over here, which means that we don’t have access to “today” until 7.00 pm. It’s really frustrating and used to be ok before the new interface.

    I posted about it here

    I also have the same problem as Ian Marsfield, whereby Analytics often crashes Firefox.

  174. Probably in the BTM catagory, but Google’s webmaster tools is showing an obscure blog post as our highest ranked page for October. Usually it’s index.html or main.html, but now it’s http://www.comstockfilms.com/blog/tony/2007/09/24/our-decision-is-final/

    No big links to that page or any other reason it should be our best ranked page.

    This isn’t a reprise of last year’s sex-search screw-up, is it?

  175. We are trying to provide directions to some of our facilities by using the ‘Link to this page’ function. However, whenever we press this link IE pops up an error message and shutsdown.

    We are running v6.0.2 sp2.

    The functionality of this ‘Link to this page’ has changed recently (not sure when) as it used to put the link information in the address bar.

  176. So far I have not came across with any problem, however sometime I’ve noticed- for searching few unique keywords I don’t get quite relevant search results though it could not be bug issue. 🙂
    -Bob

  177. I guess they are back again Matt.

    Spam pages (.cn) that redirect to sites that attempt to install malware, trojans etc are filling search results for long tail queries. The sites are all new registrations, somehow they got indexed quickly by google, and when the surfer clicks on the bad site, they are redirected with javascript.

    The page that G indexed is filled with mumbo jumbo that repeats the keywords in different orders and proximities, plus uses header tags with keyword strings, and multiple hyperlinks with the keywords randomly mixed in the anchor text. Then for final icing to fool you they link out to some legitimate web sites as well.

    The real question is why the hell are you showing these in the results? Is it because you had to look into your supplemental index for results because of a lack of quality pages that matched the query and just pushed those out because they they were the only ones there? Certainly there are a few checks and balances that would keep these from slipping in. I can think of a few.

  178. Hey Matt,

    Got a bug for you that has been peeving me for some time. It’s really simple. Basically if you have a page about “green fish” and then you decide to translate the page on green fish”” into 10 languages. You then go and link to your Dutch Green Fish page from your English Green Fish page with “Green Fish”. Here’s the problem: because a lot of Dutch is in English, the keyword is essentially the same, so when you have your “green fish” link from the english version pointing to the dutch version, Google thinks you are pointing to a page that is more relevant for that term. Not the case at all, you’re merely pointing to a translated version that just happens to use the same keyword in both languages.

    An easy fix would be to tell webmasters to use certain attributes on link to “foreign content” inside their site. e.g (as I think already exists.

    I’d really appreciate on hearing back from you on this.

    -NK

  179. Arg, it seems HTML broke the end of my last comment. It should read:

    e.g (ignores spaces) (as I think already exists)

    -NK

  180. Aaron (No, not that one)

    This one’s basic – it may be intended as a ‘feature’ to fill out the SERPs for uncommon search phrases, but for me it always brings up irrelevant results. Google pulls keywords out of form dropdown form menu lists, and thus brings up pages which are irrelevant to a search. For me, this seems to happen most frequently with geographic search terms. For example, http://www.google.com/search?q=virginia+liability+falling+tree brings up “… UT – Utah, VA – [b]Virginia[/b], VI – US Virgin Islands, VT – Vermont, WA – Washington, WI – Wisconsin …”; and http://www.google.com/search?q=georgia+restoration+of+civil+rights brings up “… Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, [b]Georgia[/b], Hawaii …”, with a state name drawn from contextually irrelevant form items on the page.

  181. I assume its never late for a bug report, so…

    Opinion or Bug;

    You should stop indexing Blog Feeds (ie: pages like blog.com/anypage/feed).

    There’s nothing more annoying then trying to read a page and it goes to a “Subscribe Page”. I just wanted to read the post, I’m searching with a web browser and ready to read it, but I can’t, help– what can I do?

    Maybe the Google page that asks me if I want to add this to the reader could put a big giant link that says “Go to the Page and Read it!” instead of a link that links the the page I’m already on – which seems a bit redundant to say the least.
    ?

    Just a thought, its really not good for SERPS to list feed links I assume people are looking to see the website NOT the feed when they search.

    Here’s what I did. I typed “Menghai Tiandiren” (no quotes) scrolled a bit to a blog called palatabilitea…

    Clicked it and it took me here:
    http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fpalatabilitea.wordpress.com%2F2007%2F05%2F23%2Fteacuppa-community-tasting-event-prelude%2Ffeed%2F

    I never made it to that blog, I decided to go back and search again because removing feed from the URL is not something I have time to do, nor would a layman searcher even conceive of that idea.

    Hope that helps, I’m gonna watch the Starbucks video now and drink my tea.
    😉

    -Alan

  182. Heya.
    Last night, November 30 of 2K7, I’ve had the mistfortune of having this happen :

    Gmail notifier let me know I have an email. Oh good, I double click it and…what, not found ? I try again – same thing. Right, I wnat to google.com “Gmail is down” just in case…and what do you know, google.com was down too.
    Except everyone I talked to, even locals, claim both services were up and healthy -_-.

    Not only that, using a proxy to fake my connection details/ip address, both services worked for me, too!
    It fixed itself by now but..what the HELL was that?

  183. Hello Matt,
    In Google Analytics, I would like to see which keywords belongs to which referring URL.

  184. Matt,

    Not sure if you still check this but something needs to be done about the Local Business results spam.

    For example if you do a search on “san francisco dvd replication” you wil only see results for 1Stop DVD and what funny is there not even in the Bay Area. I have seen this happening quite more often but that one I had on the top of my head.

    Kris

  185. hi

    I agree re. these local business map results. They are easy to spam. It seems it’s possible to update someone else’s record to promote your own url – for example this one:
    If you type in ‘best hotel london’ you get a local business result where the top one is titled: “Best Hotel-Beautiful Hotel-Hotel” , and goes to a hotel booking site, but the record belongs to a local business..
    A form of hijack, no?
    Local business results should be for local businesses only.

  186. I have not foind any major bugs but the search have been returning a lot of irrelevant results lately. Is this a new problem?

  187. Yes i have been experiencing similar problems off late with search engine giving some unusual or unrelated results first up – maybe this is because of extra optimisation.

  188. Isn’t it crazy how many people have not put down bugs here, but just things that they don’t like? When the post explicitly says put bugs down ONLY, people are still like “something that would be nice on Google is this or that” or “This I don’t like” etc. It amazes me how much people just don’t read the post. Matt put his guidelines down so clearly, and yet people STILL don’t abide by them. That’s just irritating, even for a reader like me.

  189. Hi there,

    I have always been one of Google (esp. iGoogle) since its infancy. I thought Google was making tremendous progress in adding more and more new and cool features that were highly functional and rarely contained bugs or generated errors.

    I am sad to say that I am appalled at the “make-over” that iGoogle has now taken on. The Gmail-iGoogle UI integration sucks- flat-out. Emails are formatted improperly when viewing them within iGoogle/Gmail, hyperlinks are mysteriously “unclickable”, and I have noticed an assortment of other problems with the Gmail integration (losing sent messages, not receiving messages until I check directly in Gmail).

    I mean this is ridiculous. Why try to fix (or “radically change”) something that was working perfectly? Even RSS feed article summarys no longer have a clickable expand/collapse button for easy viewing and screen space saving… I am baffled. I don’t know if this was a summer intern project gone awry, but it’s not working, and it’s making Google look real bad- I work as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company and I’ve heard several of my formerly “Google-loving” colleagues express immense dissatisfaction and dissapointment with this new “left-nav” UI and Gmail integration for iGoogle.

    Please go back to Source Control- and roll back to what worked so well, and was enjoyed by all.

    -Colin

  190. Google Australia announced that Sep 23 was the “First day of spring”, but in fact in Australia September the 1st is generally considered the first day of spring…

  191. Search for “Google add url”. The page that rank is a “thank you page”.
    Thank you pages should never rank.

    1. If you send traffic to those you usually break someone’s conversion tracking.
    2. If users visit those from Google search results they won’t be happy about it.

    Anyway, add slash after “addurl” and you’ll get the correct page.

  192. The Google is unable to find ++К, which is a new logo of one Russian long distance telecoms operator. See more: http://blog.dataparksearch.org/146

  193. IN javascript regular expressions:
    ^AB([3-4][0-9]|5[0-6])$ works correctly with IE and FF but not with Chrome
    The alternative expressions:
    ^AB([34][0-9]||5[0-6])$ or ^AB(3[0-9]|4[0-9]|5[0-6])$ do work with all 3 browsers.
    Try matching the string AB10 and you get a match when you shouldn’t with Chrome.

  194. Hans Verhagen

    Google is unable to detect correct IP addresses. Example I search in Google India on the web for “mp3 hindi ringtone” (without quotes) then the site http://dreamzatul.blogspot.com/ appears on spot 7. This site is hosted in the USA, but, as far as I know, setting in WMT is India. It gets even worse: when I choose “pages from India” the site even appears higher: spot number 3 ! How is this possible ?

  195. From what I understand, the Google News U.S. web page gets updated after a particular time interval if you keep it open in the browser. But the problem comes when someone is watching a video related to some news event and if the length of the video in terms of time is more than the time interval after which the whole page gets updated.

    Either that, or if somehow you are close to the time the page is supposed to automatically get updated/refreshed and you start a news related video close to the refresh time the page refreshes and your video is either lost (because of new link updates) or you have to scroll your web page down to the point where you had that video earlier and then relaunch it.

    I was just wondering whether there is something that can be done about this. Is it possible to show a countdown timer that says something like “Will refresh next in: 9 minutes” at least? Or maybe not do a refresh if it is detected that a video is playing and maybe refresh when the algorithm is completely sure that it won’t disrupt any user activity?

  196. the autocomplete feature is great…
    i also like the ‘Define:’ command
    but they’re not properly integrated; the autocomplete drop-down suggestions omits the colon, thus achieving an undesirable result.

  197. Here is one bug:

    I am adding a new account to my google analytics.

    At the first step where I type the domain name there is field for choosing of time zone:
    “Time zone country or territory:”

    My country is Bulgaria, so I find it and choose it, but it is strange that it says “Bulgaria GMT+3”. And whole territory of Bulgaria is GMT+2, not 3.

  198. I live in the Philippines. Google.com.ph is composed in Tagalog by default even though that dialect is native to only about a third of the population. When using the Google search bar in Firefox for a search, there is no obvious way to switch to English.

    I know that I can go to

    Google.com.ph/en

    but that cancels the convenience of the google search bar on browsers.

    Should be an easy matter to fix.

  199. Currently the localized version of google at google.ch (switzerland) is the only version of google I can reach.
    If I try to use any service on google.com it is so sluggish that it is unusable. This includes the webmail.
    IMAP instead _does_ work.

    I had to switch to yahoo for many services, including search, since the toolbar uses google.com.
    These problems have been going on since at least yesterday.

  200. massive scary google bug:

    I share a macbook with my girlfriend. We both have separate accounts on the macbook but sometimes we log in to our google web services using the other person’s account.

    On her account when she loads igoogle it shows her name as logged in in the upper right and all her gadgets and news and stuff. But one of the gadgets is google chat. The crazy bug is that it has all my contacts and is signed in as me! My google is all set up in the USA and all her stuff is set up in France. When I go to http://www.gmail.com it logs in as me. When I go to igoogle.com it logs in as me (with my gadgets and everything) but when I go to igoogle.fr it logs in as her with all her gadgets but my contacts and stuff!

    Yucky ugly scary bug!

  201. If you are searching in google maps for example Černošice, V Lavičkách (village, street) it will found V Lavičkách, 252 28 Cernotín – correct zip code, correct street, wrong village name. It is a bit confusing in some applications like this katastr2.appspot.com

  202. Bertrand Lorent

    This is not a very critical bug, but I can’t help seeing it every time I log in!

    On Belgium’s google home page google.be we can select one of our 3 official languages + english. When the current language is “Nederlands”, the first letter of the word “français” is lower-case, while the other are not. This is not the case when the current language is french, english or german.

  203. I’m trying to export my Google Notebooks to Google Docs.

    In Google Notebook I go to Manage Notebooks -> Export -> Document (Export this notebook to Google Docs)

    I get a page with the title “500 Server Error” and the text:
    Server Error
    The server had trouble completing your request, but this is probably a temporary error. Please try again in 30 seconds.
    This has been happening for a month now, so I think the advice to wait 30 seconds is a bit optimistic.

  204. Hi Matt,

    I have noticed a very annoying bug in the results of a Google search using the Google site in Spanish (however, it seems that the bug also appears in the English Google site). If you type for instance “hechas de uretano” (the quotes should be included in the search string) you will be directed to the following web address with the results:

    http://www.google.es/#hl=es&source=hp&q=%22hechas+de+uretano%22&btnG=Buscar+con+Google&meta=&aq=f&oq=%22hechas+de+uretano%22&fp=120d73706d7f3736

    This page shows that there are aprox. 9,020,000 results. However, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see that only appear 5 results page!

    In fact, if you click on the last page (results page 5), you will see that the count of results is now 24. Even if you include the omitted results you will not get more than 106 results!

    How is this possible??? I mean, why are 9,020,000 results reported if there are just 24-106 results? We use Google in our work to decide which word combinations are more usual and this issue is very annoying for us.

    Many thanks for your help and if you have any question about this issue, please do not hesitate to contact me!

    Jose

  205. When a description was made like this: keyword1,keyword2,keyword3 instead of keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 the description in the SERPS goes behind the sponsored links on the right side. Its a authority website which uses description and keyword tag both the same on a subdomain. IE8 1024px is giving this problem, but in FF it looks fine. Google Netherlands knows about it but i got back a aswer like this: It’s a adwords problem, please visit…
    No its a IE CSS problem in natural serps. 3/4 year back i already reported this, but now it’s back again.

  206. I have a weird problem with Google Maps. Whenever I move around by clicking and dragging, the scale changes randomly. It’s shown three different scales for the same number of miles, and even shows California and Spain as being 500 miles apart. But only sometimes. If you click and drag the scale will change to 1000 miles or something like that, which is still wrong.
    Anyway, all the numbers are either 200 miles, 500 miles, 1000 miles, and 2000 miles (but rarely). I haven’t been able to reproduce the “China is fifty meters across” error more than once.

  207. Hi Matt

    Just a while ago, I have noticed a strange behaviour in the Google home page which I would like it to bring it to your kind notice. I have captured the bug screen shots in picasa with captions elaborating the steps to reproduce the bug( in 3 steps). Hope this information is useful to Google in some way. Thanks for the opportunity.

    The bug screen shots are here: http://picasaweb.google.co.in/ayyappan/GoogleBug#

  208. Hi Matt 🙂

    We just got invited for DFP Small Business in Japan. Upon signing in to our new account, we noticed a small bug. I clicked the Top Right “Tips Icon”

    The first step to serving ads is to create ad units. (1 of 6)
    Tip: Click New Ad Unit on the ‘Inventory’ tab.

    That link lands here:
    https://www.google.com/dfp/www.google.com/support/dfp_sb/bin/answer.py?hl=en_US&answer=82275

    But it should actually land here:
    http://www.google.com/support/dfp_sb/bin/answer.py?hl=en_US&answer=82275

    Please have a great day!

  209. Missing symbols in lithuanian language translation (in pictures filtering options):

    http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/3593/googlebug.png

    “alsvai mlyna” should be “žalsvai mėlyna”

    “brimas” should be “brėžimas”

    Using Firefox v3.6.3 (english),
    (checked with all the character encodings)

  210. Hi Matt,

    Here is an interesting one. It appears the googlebot fetched content off a completely unrelated site and cached it as our homepage. See this cached snapshot – how can it be?

    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.datarecovery.co.nz

    We are the developer of http://www.datarecovery.co.nz and when searching for our site you see a greek PDF as the listing for the homepage – its not there when you click the link, but its on the results page.

  211. Hi,

    I rarely use the search box that comes up on google’s pages itself. I usually use the built-in text box in my browser, but I noticed an issue when I just used the search box today. The up arrow no longer brings you to the beginning of your search terms. I even tried option-uparrow which is usually a work-around for other similar fields which have pop-ups like the new search box google implemented, but that didn’t work either. I had to either use the mouse or the left arrow. This is probably just a mac issue because I don’t think up-arrow ever worked to bring the cursor to the beginning of a line on a PC. I know this is probably a low-priority item, but it would make probably many advanced mac-users happy.

    Rob

  212. There is a minor issue, regarding the way iGoogle handles the window.mouseleave event. The iGoogle gadgets are highlighted when the mouse moves over them and are de-focused when the mouse leaves them. If you have another window open and focused on top of the web browser, the browser will send mouse events to Javascript, but the script does not de-highlight the last selected gadget if the mouse leaves the window and moves over the top window. Speaking from a purist point of view, the gadgets should always de-highlight when the mouse is no longer in control of the browser window and should always re-highlight when the mouse regains control of the browser window and is moving directly over a gadget.

  213. Google NCR Image Search still has the ugly old Google logo (pre May 2010). Go to: google.com/ncr and select Images.

  214. This is an issue with the Google Realtime Search. Searching for anything, say Google and then clicking the web link in the top left passes the GET search data incorrectly. This results in a 404 error:

    Not Found

    The requested URL /search&q=google was not found on this server.

  215. Dear Matt,

    I think there is an issue with the way Google handles the redirection of the user’s query in the “Updates” section.

    The bug is present at least in the international (US) and italian version.

    Steps needed to reproduce the bug:

    1) Search anything on google
    2) Click on “More”
    3) Click on the “Updates” tab
    4) Click on “Web” in the upper left corner of the screen

    Output of the bug: 404 page (the user gets redirected to http://www.google.com/search&q=test instead of http://www.google.com/search?q=test )

  216. Hebrew Calendar – wrong holiday name

    The holiday of Rosh HaShana is known as the Jewish New Year. On Google calendar, it appears in Hebrew as “The Civil New Year” – Rosh HaShana HaEzrachit – HaEzrachit meaning civil. That is the wrong name. In Hebrew, when we say the civil new year, we’re referring to January 1st. The Hebrew should simply read Rosh HaShana.

    Sharon Tzur

  217. Hi, I found a bug with image search.

    #1. Search for something.
    #2. Hover over one of the image results.
    #3. Click the search text field.
    #4. Try to use the left and right arrow keys to edit your search text. This will not work; instead, the focus will leave the text field and your arrow keys will browse the image results below.

  218. Hi Matt,
    This isn’t so much of a bug as it is a feature request and it deals with youtube. It would be really nice if the “embed” code generated for sharing video on another site included the “wmode” parameter, so that users don’t have to edit the code to get divs to display on top of the player.

  219. Marius Piedallu van Wyk

    Hi,

    There seems to be a problem with the Gmail Labs module of ‘Default Text Styling’.

    Simply do the following:

    1. Enable the Labs Default Text Styling feature.
    2. In Settings -> General go to ‘Default text style’ section.
    3. Even though it is already normal, select Normal as the text size dropdown and Save.
    4. Compose a new e-mail, and type a few words (with one word misspelled)
    5. Right-click on the incorrect word and select a correct word.

    The rest of the line suddenly shrinks to a 0 or 1 point sized font. I am using current stable Chrome on Mac OS X (if that matters.)

  220. Google SERP stylesheet Issue PrtScn – http://goo.gl/bwhur

  221. not consistent bug
    1. Firefox 3.6.13, with WebDev plugin, disable javascript
    2. search for, web – for example, from G home
    3. Then choose ‘images’ view
    4. It shows search results in the old style search results
    screen grab of the the above with url, etc:
    http://tinyurl.com/6gtj3e9
    (not spam btw)
    5. If I nav away, to video, for example, then go back to images via the images link, result display OK, i.e. images (minus js function still)
    6 – If you go from images to maps, it jumps to Places, then select images from here, the results look like a mobile version of the results.
    When you view the results in the above old style/layout for >web< search results number are random, from 2,830,000,000 to 3,210,000,000 (see attached link)
    With js enabled, normally, srch result number is: About 4,760,000,000 results (0.10 seconds)

  222. Kayalvizhi Manickavel

    If you search with the keyword ‘Marcus Majestic Brookfield’ in google search engine, the following error is obtained:

    3Showtimes for Marcus Majestic Brookfield
    Fast Five – ‎2hr 10min – ‎Rated PG-13 – ‎Action/Adventure/Drama/Suspense/Thriller
    Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family – ‎1hr 45min – ‎Rated PG-13 – ‎Comedy
    Water for Elephants – ‎2hr 0min – ‎Rated PG-13 – ‎Drama
    Marcus Majestic Brookfield – ‎770 N. Springdale Road, Waukesha, WI – ‎

    /movies?hl=en&near=brookfield&dq=marcus+majestic+brookfield&q=marcus+majestic&sa=X&ei=xwa7Te3fNZC2tge1tti0BQ&ved=0CBAQxQMoAQMore movies

    Kindly look into these….

  223. I’m using English Windows, Google Chrome with preferences set to English. I’m logged into my Google account with preferences set to English. But I am in Finland and when I go to Google Checkout to add my credit card details, the page ignores my preferences and is displayed in Finnish, a language which I cannot read sufficiently well to get the accuracy needed in financial situations. When I select English from the drop-down list, all is well until the next page with the Terms of Use etc., and it’s back to Finnish again and I can’t see an option to change the language. Therefore I cannot confidently sign up for Google Checkout. I consider this a bug in Google Checkout because my Google account is logged in and set to ‘use English for Google products’.

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