How many ways do you think we can find to break Google?

Let me start things off. I just found Google’s Internet Stats page:

breakinggoogle Try to search for anything containing the word “internet” and the system just seems to hang. It was still hanging after I downloaded and upgraded my WordPress installation.

Dave Naylor, another UK SEO has been finding loads of broken SERPs recently around Geo-issues. He spotted this one today:

za-results

There are BOUND to be more. Got an insane search result? Found a way to crash Google scholar? or Chrome? I would love to build a list of ways to break the system. I’m sure the boys and gals at the ‘plex would be interested too!

Here is a broken link with the anchor text try me. Added 29/1/24. How long will it be before Google reports it? (recrawl requested).


Dixon Jones

An award-winning Search and Internet Marketer. Search Personality of the year Lifetime achievement award Outstanding technology individual of the year International public speaker for 20 years in the field of SEO and Internet Marketing, including: Pubcon; Search Engine Strategies (SMX); Brighton SEO; Ungagged; Search Leeds; State of Search; RIMC and many more.

6 Comments

Andy Langton · 24th November 2009 at 1:13 pm

I actually wrote a breaking Google article a little while ago:

http://andylangton.co.uk/articles/seo/breaking-google-with-advanced-operators/

They’ve since fixed the examples I gave though 😉

Dixon Jones · 2nd December 2009 at 10:36 am

Here’s another poor result – Get one massive website, and have empty skeleton pages ranking in the serps: http://www.receptional.com/blogs/seo/rank-with-boilerplate-text

Dave Dugdale · 2nd December 2009 at 2:27 pm

I tried the word “internet” and it doesn’t hang anymore. They must be reading your blog!

Dixon Jones · 31st December 2009 at 5:06 pm

Here’s another one. There seems to be a bug in the SERPS layout when using Safari at the moment, where they have inserted the Live twitter results, they have white space if you have not had multiple tweets in a while:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3149163&id=602835896

mt2 · 12th May 2010 at 11:37 am

it seems they were undergoing changes at the time

benjo · 20th April 2011 at 1:08 pm

just type 000000..000000

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