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Comment by mirzap | Hacker News Reader

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mirzap

It seems that this site (emojipedia.org) broke the Google.

"how many emojis on ios -inurl:emojipedia.org"

trying to exclude other sites does not work:

how many emojis on ios -inurl:cnet.com

how many emojis on ios -inurl:wikipedia.org

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My guess is that it will be a problem with handling Unicode in some way. There will be a page on emojipedia with some Unicode emojis in the title or description that Google can’t handle while trying to extract the text to display a result.

I'm curious if we can weaponize this to take down google. lol.

Not that we should... but curiosity does lead to some interesting finds sometimes.

It's the opposite. You can weaponize it to kill other sites SEO by spamming the offending emoji in them.

It's both. A broken Google result page is a lost opportunity for ad revenue for Google.

> Not that we should

relax with the disclaimers, I think we're all on the same side.

> curious if we can weaponize this to take down google. lol.

I was thinking more of accessing the Google search binary or source code.

>Unicode emojis in the title or description

or url, or some other edge case like https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/10/14/there-is-a-tab-in-my-...

searching for "emojipedia.com" breaks it

https://www.google.com/search?q=emojipedia.com

I can't reproduce this one, i.e. this url works fine for me.

At the same time I can reproduce the results from the grandparent comment.

I can reproduce that. Interesting, because the .com site redirects to the .org, and saearching for the org site on Google does not cause the error.

Yes, however searching for ““emojipedia.com””(quoted exact search) does work.

This site is on multiple domains, so you can try excluding emojipedia entirely (org,com). Works perfectly:

how many emojis on ios -emojipedia

how many emojis on ios inurl:emojipedia.org

is slow, but works, while

how many emojis on ios

still does not work.

Maybe it's multiple sites that would individually just cause a slowdown but together push it over the edge?

After all (at least for me) it doesn't crash immediately but it more seems to throw an error after a timeout because it keeps loading without result.

I wonder what's so special about that site that is able to break/timeout Google's index

Maybe they broke the back button so hard that even the google bot can't get out?

Probably a Unicode character whose bytes are misinterpreted by some weakly typed C++ or Java code.

why does it break when using "how many emojis on ios before:1969-12-31" though? what's the website emojipedia got to do with unix epoch time?

I don't think this filter works correctly since no record existed before that, so google still returns emojipedia result.

Check:

https://www.google.com/search?q=google%20before%3A1969-12-31

this one works:

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+before%3A2006-12-31

I think the .com version breaks it.

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