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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

Every single one of his search examples "that breaks Bing" works for me just fine.

Either Bing fixed this the same hour his blog post was made, or he just ran into a temporary snag.

And his Google search of the error code on Bing is just that, a snapshot of a temporary error that has no correlation to any particular keyword in the url.

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Bing seems to do refer[r]er and/or cookie checking. If I enter the search on www.bing.com or have a cookie from bing, a search for phpbb produces results, if I clear all all bing cookies and enter http://www.bing.com/search?q=phpbb in the location bar, I get the error.

Same for me.

browsing in an incognito window should reproduce the error.

it does

an unsophisticated fix for an unsophisticated exploit

if the exploit supported cookies and could mimic IE it would bypass this form of blocking

That link works for me (or rather, dies and gives an error). By way of giving multiple data points.

This.

Clean history - Bing spits an error, visit bing.com, then search - everything's fine.

I'd be interested in which browser you're using, and if you could check with a different one. I mention in the article that some browsers seem to be redirected before the bot filter kicks in (IE9, for example, but not IE8).

You can see the results of the bug on about 50 browsers here:

http://browsershots.org/http://www.bing.com/explore?q=topic+...

I get the crash in safari on osx but not firefox or chrome

Keeping these query things aside, Bing is not even loading in Opera mini 6 !

Works fine in Opera!

It seems to be related to whether or not you have a bing cookie in your browser or not. I can turn on private browsing have them fail, then use a session with a bing cookie and have them succeed.

They all consistently fail for me, Firefox 5 on Linux.

Ditto; same with Chrome, wget and curl.

The "what topics do they discuss on the view?" search initially failed for me. So I went directly to Bing and typed it in manually and it worked from there on out, even going back and clicking the link in the article.

No dice for me with Chrome on a Mac.

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