8 ms·
Google search was giving errors when searching “how many emojis on iOS”
- name_y 4y agoAlso happens if you replace "iOS" with "Windows".
- thegeekpirate 4y agoIt takes a while to load, but it doesn't give me a server error like "ios" does.
- londons_explore 4y agoTaking a while to load is probably indicative of the problem.... There's probably some O(n^3) memory or compute complexity going on somewhere of the number of emojis on the page. For example, I imagine Google uses as a final ranking step some stuff based on the similarity of the pages about to be returned - to make sure you aren't about to show the user two pages that are practically identical. That logic might try to build similarity mappings between the pages, and has logic that fails badly for large numbers of emoji.
- olliej 4y agoI would guess it's the time that is the problem - whatever service would produce an inline answer is presumably falling over, and the subsequent timeout is reported as an error.
- abbassi 4y ago
- Apocryphon 4y agoToo many, clearly.
- faizshah 4y agoAll I can think about is the poor oncall engineer waking up to a latency alarm on a saturday night.
- soheil 4y agoGoogle has offices in many timezones.
- londons_explore 4y agoBut the emoji search addin feature will be developed by a team in mountain view... So if emergency code changes need to be made for this bug HN has just found, they will still be woken up.
- tex0 4y agoHow do you know?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- klodolph 4y agoAny major product at Google has an on-call team with offices in multiple time zones. Typically, two engineers from different time zones will be on-call at any given time—they switch back and forth between primary and secondary, so nobody is primary on-call during the middle of the night, local time. For example, you might have an SRE team in Mountain View, and an SRE team in Dublin. Maybe the engineer in Mountain View is primary on-call until midnight, and then it switches to the engineer in Dublin, who starts their shift at 8:00 AM. If it’s getting code changes, it’s not getting code changes right now. The software engineers may be in Mountain View, but they won’t patch this and push out a new version during the night. Someone (read: an SRE) may change a configuration or push out a temporary fix now, and any code changes will only go out after significant testing. Generally speaking, you don’t hotfix high-profile production services. You rollback, you set up filters, you disable features, you turn off component services, you run in a degraded capacity—but if you want to actually change the code, you take your time and do it right. Rushing out a code change in the middle of the night is liable to make things worse, and nobody wants to do it.
- datatravel 4y agoDuckDuckGo is the answer then.
- bartvk 4y agoDDG is my default browser, this is the search result: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+many+emojis+on+iOS&t=fpas&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+many+emojis+on+iOS&t=fpas&ia=w... The third sesrch result attempts to answer the question. The 1st and 2nd are related but not perfectly relevant.
- iopq 4y agohttps://search.brave.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios https://search.brave.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios the emoji list is the #1 match on brave
- californical 4y agoKagi finds the emoji list just fine as well! https://kagi.com/search?q=how%20many%20emojis%20on%20ios https://kagi.com/search?q=how%20many%20emojis%20on%20ios Hilariously, the third result on Kagi is a direct link to the google search that crashes, I wonder where it pulled this from: https://imgur.com/a/sCmeADy https://imgur.com/a/sCmeADy
- freediver 4y agoThat is funny. It is Kagi's own news crawler.
- pastelsky 4y agoSomething to do with processing an unusually large number of emojis? I wonder if processing emoji characters has any different performance characteristics than other UTF characters.
- bubblehack3r 4y agoThis happens on google.com too: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=how+many+emojis+on+ios https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=ho...
- soheil 4y agoServer Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue. Please try again later.
- sleepychu 4y agoFascinating. "How many bananas on iOS" and "how many emojis on Android", "emojis on iOS" work fine. Maybe the quantity question is running into an error trying to make one of those cards? Incredible that it just crashes search though.
- justshowpost 4y ago
- theK 4y agoWell in Europe google.com returns a 500 error for that query, so crashes is the correct term for this.
- justshowpost 4y ago
- matkoniecz 4y agofollowing is shown to users: > Server Error > We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue. > Please try again later. this is a handled crash, but still a crash
- justshowpost 4y ago
- soheil 4y agoAlso breaks for how many emojis are there on iphone
- ummonk 4y ago"how many emojis in ios" seems to trip it too edit: so does "how many emojis ios" and "how many emojis apple" but not "how many emojis android"
- theK 4y agoWould be definitely interesting to read a report on what triggers this error! I don’t think it is a tile error as presumably the backend that collects all the answers would be set up in a way that is resilient to upstream errors. So maybe the core results compiler?
- faizshah 4y agoI'm not sure exactly how it works but if you look at the network requests for "how many emojis ios" vs "how many emojis android" the html for the initial page contains an internal server error whereas the android version contains some more javascript which contains the search results.
- 1f60c 4y agoI don't think the public will ever learn what went wrong here, but whichever Googler fixes this will have one heck of a war story to tell over drinks.
- shadowgovt 4y agoThe likeliest candidate is probably the final render step. Under the hood, search farms the query out to multiple backends, gathers partials from them, and then composites those partials into the final rendered page. For an actual 500 to surface to the user, that final compositing step is probably what fails; gathering and compositing are already robust against an individual backend failing to return a result. I'm on board with other people's suggestions that asking a question like this is tripping over a site that surfaced an emoji in their site title that is choking the Unicode library that Google is relying upon.
- abbassi 4y ago
- greendude29 4y agoInterestingly it crashes starting on "how many emojis on i"
- ezekg 4y agoWorks on Kagi. Must be superior.
- manholio 4y agoAlso works for "how many emojis iphone" but strangely not other platforms like Windows or Android.
- soheil 4y agoMy guess is this is related to instant answers section at the top of the search results. It's trying to figure out the count, but it's failing for one reason or another.
- NetOpWibby 4y agoNeeva for Safari loads with no problem. Wonder what makes Google wig out.
- newbieuser 4y agomaybe this is a google joke. there are so many that they cannot calculate.
- mormegil 4y agoHave you tried to ask "show me the set of emojis which cannot be found by Google Search"? :-)
- goforbg 4y agoServer Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue. Please try again later.
- llui85 4y agoInteresting. "how many emojis on ios" - error "how many emojis on apple" - error "how many emojis on windows" - error "how many emojis on macos" - working "how many emojis on lumia" - error "how many emojis lumia" - error "how many emojis on linux" - working "how many ios emoji" - working (albeit slowly) "how many emojis on messages ios" - working "how many emojis on ipados" - working "how many emojis in ios" - error "how many emojis inside ios" - error "ios number of emojis" - working "how many emojis on i" - working "how many emojis on ios has" - error "how many emojis on ios has does" - error "how many emojis on ios has does how has does how has does how" - error I'd hazard that a specific web page appearing in the results is probably causing this error - I would be very curious to find out which page this is. Edit: Yep, a specific .com site seems to be causing it: "how many emojis on ios site:com" - error "how many emojis on ios site:aero" - works
- hiergiltdiestfu 4y agocan't reproduce your results. works for me..
- soheil 4y ago> Yep, a specific .com site seems to be causing it: If you add a start date filter (even since 2000 years ago) it will work.
- LaRuim 4y agoPre 1968 doesn't work
- wzyoi 4y agoorg - error io, net, ru - ok
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aerovistae 4y agopretty clever narrowing down of the problem, well done
- bubblehack3r 4y agoSearching through Google translate loads the page but without content: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&u=https://www.google.com/search?q%3Dhow%2Bmany%2Bemojis%2Bon%2Bios%26oq%3Dhow%2Bmany%2Bemojis%2Bon%2Bios&client=webapp https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&u=h...
- geewee 4y agoSeems to not crash for me - just takes several seconds to load the results.
- stncls 4y agoThis looks like a timeout. - same request with "s" removed from "emojis": works, but in 5.03 seconds (!) - "how many emoji symbols on ios": 1.37 seconds Other modifications further decrease the request time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- silisili 4y agoIt blows my mind that after a decade or so of dominance, they don't have a fast 'fail and remove from results' implemented.
- superjan 4y agoOr they do have handling for errors and the extra code did not handle all types of failure modes and added new failure modes on its own.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- scarab92 4y agoOf course they do, every large search implementation has done that if a node times out, since the 90's. Something unusual about this query evidently triggered a bug in the somewhere. We will probably never know the specifics.
- loa_in_ 4y agoThat's a great way to remove work for engineers, bit it's not a solution
- heshan666 4y agohow many emojis in iOS works instantly, 100ms on the search request
- 4y ago
- soheil 4y agoIf you add a start date filter (even since 2000 years ago) it will work.
- firecall 4y agoBloody does too!
- lucasfcosta 4y agoFascinating! It may be trying to create that response panel on the top with the absolute number but maybe it's erroring out when trying to parse the actual Unicode points.
- withinboredom 4y agoCounting Unicode characters is hard.
- aerovistae 4y agoI think my favorite part is that this is so outrageously unheard of that the error isn't even CSS-styled correctly. Zero left margin, just up against the edge of the window. Nobody even thinks about this case of an error being displayed because it's so rare.
- soheil 4y agoCan't be that unheard of. Here it is in 2020 https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/29809009/google-search-internal-server-error https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/29809009/google-...
- comboy 4y agoGiven amount of searches, your counterexample being from 2020 seems to be just proving the point. But I would imagine in most cases, when there's backend error you could fall back on some simpler engine and display that without user having any clue.
- exikyut 4y agoIt also makes me think that there's probably broken ownership of the plumbing around the obviously-novel routing/layout/presentation path taken when this error is shown. A while back while poking around I landed on an interstitial page of some kind using an old 2005-era Google logo, which was cute. Obviously nobody'd noticed and submitted the page in question to whatever bit of internal gunk was presumably used to track where the logo needed updating. But that makes me wonder - the glitch I saw was a platform-level thing easily missed - but is Search that much of a vast, not-particularly-cohesively-integrated expanse too?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PieUser 4y agoSearching for "emojipedia.com" causes it to hang as well
- swagmoney1606 4y agoIt appears to cause errors with my Google Home as well. Asking it "How many emojis on iOS?" (exactly the same as the OP string) causes my google home to stall for quite a bit (about 20 seconds or so). All other queries resolve almost instantly.
- justshowpost 4y agoI love how "hackers" are defending evil-corp-with-happy-face-logo
- user3939382 4y agoYeah the HN culture isn’t really the hacker culture of yore, which was pretty anti-establishment.
- alpaca128 4y agoWhere are you seeing a defense? I only see attempts to explain it or reproduce the error with different inputs, aka things hackers tend to do. You can find Google bad without losing your mind about it.
- Razengan 4y ago"That day, we found a way to fight back..."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- soheil 4y agoSame exact error message appearing on Google Scholar in 2015 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33741372/google-server-gives-a-server-error-with-the-first-request-in-private-browsing-mo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33741372/google-server-g...
- r0n0j0y 4y agoI see 'Server Error' for "how many emojis on ios" Works fine for "how many emojis in ios"
- soheil 4y agoRelated discussion from a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393051
- thompsonparker 4y agoGetting the following now: Server Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue. Please try again later.
- jbverschoor 4y agoMy guess: when you search, google fires up several background processes/threads for that query. Not only search, but also for a quick answers, maps, ads. These services might be slower than the search query or a max response time, in which case they get ignored. When the search query finished, they might wait a few milliseconds for the other services, if it’s still under the target response time. After that google will render the results with all info that completed. My guess is that one of these services crashes, most likely the main search one. This way you can wait forever for it to finish. So it’s probably a bug in the way it’s yielding/waiting for the spawned processes. Other option is that for certain processes they don’t spawn a background process, because it’s faster to run locally/direct/in-memory, because the data is quite small and just rums on every node. they’d start this after spawning the other processes, so if this service returns an error, it might screw up the yielding/waiting/collecting, although I’d expect an exception/error page instead of the indefinite waiting that’s happening
- jbverschoor 4y agoNot sure why I got downvoted but whatever
- tarsinge 4y agoBecause you are just stating what is obviously happening on a very high-level ("it crashes because something crash"), it’s generic and is applicable to any website. Your comment is empty regarding why it happens only to that query specifically.
- jbverschoor 4y agoIt's not that obvious. Most (99.99+%) applications don't spawn queries in parallel to run in parallel. The site didn't crash but was hanging. And I specifically described how this could happen -> an error the code that waits for futures to finish The whole thread is pretty obvious, right? Some website not working. big deal.
- tomalpha 4y ago
- tech234a 4y agoStartpage, which uses Google's search API, returns no results for this query [1], so it may not be an issue relating to Instant Answers. [1]: https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?query=how+many+emojis+on+ios https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?query=how+many+emojis+on...
- andirk 4y agoAccording to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393051 , a couple years ago people were getting the "We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue." and it was because of a fireball?
- yreg 4y agoFor me the query timed out on first attempt, but worked on the subsequent ones.
- adunk 4y agoAfter seeing this, I can't be the only one who got curious as to how many emojis there actually are on iOS. Obviously, a quick google doesn't work right now. So I did this to try to figure out: emojipedia.org, the site that supposedly breaks google, has a page that appears to show all the available emojis on iOS [1]. On this page, all except the first 21 emojis are displayed in a way that uses lazy loading of the images. These images are contained in <li class="lazyparent"> elements. Assuming that there are no other <li class="lazyparent"> elements on the page, we should get the number of emojis on iOS simply by counting those elements. Opening up the console and running document.getElementsByClassName('lazyparent').length gives us 4037. So the total number of emojis on iOS should be 4037 + 21 = 4058. If the above method is correct, that is. [1] https://emojipedia.org/apple/ https://emojipedia.org/apple/
- NaughtyShiba 4y agoYou can also use `querySelectorAll` and also pass parent’s selector. Didn’t get to post while I was back at computer, so can’t recall exact selector, but number was same
- jraph 4y agoCongratulations, your sentence "So the total number of emojis on iOS should be 4037 + 21 = 4058" is now used in the Google results.
- habibur 4y agoNot only on .nz ... this happens on the main site google.com too. Displaying the message "Server Error : Internal server error..." after spending a long time for the page to download. That indicates every search we are making might be triggering a high CPU load somewhere before displaying the message.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- peter_retief 4y agoMust be fixed now, I don't get an error.
- nestea-ca 4y agoLooks like it was just fixed as I got an infinite load a few minutes ago but now it works fine. My fanciful guess is that they use a LM (language model) to determine if something is an answerable question and then if it is parse certain pages with an LM if it is classified as an answerable question. Maybe the LM stuttered on something on emojipedia.
- bubblehack3r 4y agoUPDATE: Looks like it is fixed now - https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=how+many+emojis+on+ios https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=ho...
- Monotoko 4y agoSeems to be working now, not sure if it's just me or whether it's working for everyone?
- NaughtyShiba 4y agoSeems to be fixed indeed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kbob 4y agoFixed in under three hours. Once again, the front page of HN is the most effective bug reporting mechanism.
- nashashmi 4y agoWe should put up Bug HN on the top head. And rank them for severity.
- johndfsgdgdfg 4y agoThis is a good reminder for everyone to switch to other search providers.
- wslh 4y agoSounds like they are recognizing and redirecting searches to specific functions. It is obvious but with this error we can make a conjecture that some of these functions are written as multiple code snippets without too much engineering responsability. Just my two cents remembering Google acquisition of Freebase and a quest for understanding content at a higher level (e.g. number of retweets in a tweet).
- nwsm 4y ago> number of retweets in a tweet Interesting- the goal was to use that information for page ranking?
- wslh 4y agoObviously, Google is aware of content beyond the text: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/28/23377358/google-search-reddit-discussions-forums-results https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/28/23377358/google-search-re...
- captainmuon 4y agoI would guess it has nothing to do with the index, and more with widgets - these special little result boxes that appear when you do a calculation, ask for the weather, and so on. Google has quite a few of them, and some are pretty whimsical. I read that new people on the search / frontpage team get to write on of those as a training task. They must be quite encapsulated from the rest of the system. But obviously at some point one of them is going to have a bug. Just guessing, maybe it was supposed to show a certain emoji, like "hamburger emoji on iOS", and got tripped up by the result of a search like "how many site:emojipedia.org" which leads to the FAQ and that can't be parsed?
- reaperducer 4y agoIf a search engine returns the same quality of information with an error message as it does with the actual results, is it really an error?