Missing some of your tweets? Yeah, you’re not going crazy. Others appear to be missing them, as well, and Twitter confirms there’s a temporary problem. Earlier today, Jill Whalen — one of the moderators at our sister-site Sphinn — noticed that our Sphinn account only had three tweets when she looked at it, all from […]
This morning I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that there were several reports from searchers that they can’t go beyond page one of the Google search results. For example, if you searched for [shoe], you would get ten results and if you wanted the 11th result, normally you would click on the number 2 […]
For some searchers, Google seems to be forcing them into 20 or more search results on a page. By default, Google shows searchers 10 results on a page, but even if that searcher specified 10 on a page, some may be seeing twenty or more per page. Andy Beard and myself are in that test […]
Google is working to fix at least a pair of bugs in the Google Places dashboard, both of which affect the analytics reporting related to a local business listing. One bug is a delay in the analytics reporting inside Google Places. Earlier this week, users noticed that stats were only available through July 12th — […]
Google says it may be “multiple weeks” before they’re able to fix a Google Maps bug that’s showing the wrong star ratings for some local businesses. A paper/stationery store in Toronto reported the bug last month in the Google Maps Help Forum. The store’s Place Page shows several reviews that are being pulled in from […]
The Google AdWords Blog wrote that yesterday at about 4:30pm to 7:30pm (EST), there was an AdWords ad serving bug that prevented ads from being displayed. Google said the ads were not showing on Google.com and Search Partner sites at around 4:40pm. Google posted the issue at 6:30pm and updated the post about an hour […]
The Google Webmaster Central team posted a known issue report with a bug in the reporting engine within Google Webmaster Tools. The indexed URLs report is currently showing 0 pages indexed for most sites who have submitted sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools. The notice reads: The indexed URL counts for Sitemaps that you have submitted […]
Yesterday, several blogs noticed that the Google executives page was showing up in Chinese language. The initial suspicions was that someone upset about Google’s decision to redirect Google China to Google Hong Kong and they hacked the page to show in Chinese. As more reports came out, some users noticed the page was also coming […]
This morning I spotted a case where Google Movie Search began showing this cryptic message about the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and United States. A search for [movie: nine nyc] returned the words “Showtimes for September 11 attacks” in the blue bar under the search box. Here is a picture: Google […]
Google is suffering through a somewhat embarrassing turn of events regarding its Favorite Place decals, but the company that’s actually responsible for the problem says a fix is on the way. QuickMark, makers of an iPhone app that has led users to the wrong URL when a Favorite Places decal is scanned, says it has […]
I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Google AdSense is displaying ads with weird characters in the titles and ad descriptions. The characters seem to be broken HTML entities of some sort, where the HTML is not escaping properly. Here are screen shots from the ads on this site and my personal blog: Google […]
Over the weekend, I received several emails, noticed dozens of Tweets, saw several forum posts and noticed for myself that Google Social Search experimental search feature went offline. If you have opt in to the Social Search feature at google.com/experimental you will notice an error on your Google searches that reads, “The experiment you’re trying […]
Wired reports Google has fixed a year old bug where 700 million posts within a Usenet group were unsearchable via Google Groups. Google fixed this bug after Wired called them out for the blunder. Google sent Wired a response that read: It turns out there was a bug, a specific bug, that affected search within […]
uTest released a study they named “Battle of the Search Engines” which measured the relevancy of Google, Yahoo, and Bing based on “search results accuracy, page load speed, real-time relevance and usability.” The report found that there were over 600 “bugs” found in the test. By “bug” I believe they mean links that lead to […]
It appears that Bing is overriding the default search provider set by users of Internet Explorer 6. Several IE6 users have complained that since Bing launched, the search provided went from Google (which they set manually) to Bing. To makes things even worse, when the user tries to set the search provider back from Bing […]
Over the course of the past month or two, there have been several reports that Google is allowing AdWords ads to have extended character limits, above what is allowed in the guidelines. I reported this at the Search Engine Roundtable earlier this month, where Google told me “We haven’t changed our AdWords policy regarding the […]
Over the weekend a confirmed Google Docs bug may have shared your private Google Documents with others, without your permission. Google said this “affected less than 0.05% of all documents.” What exactly happened? “The inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a […]
In the past day or so, I have spotted at least four somewhat major bugs with Google’s various products. They include Google sending dozens of unwanted SMS messages to thousands of users, Google’s safe filter not working properly, Google News using an unusually large font size and Google Docs has a major spam issue as […]
Steve Rubel reported seeing an excess of what he calls “Blog Thumbnails” in the Google search results. In short, when you do certain searches, Google may show little thumbnail alongside the first set of results. For Steve, this has been happening for “blogger’s name and some other related keywords.” Personally, I have been seeing these […]
Google’s SearchWiki is off to a rough start in the user feedback/public relations department, and has already been knocked offline by some kind of technical issue. SearchWiki usage seems fair to strong, depending on the queries you’re looking at, but is it the type of usage Google wants? Let’s take a look at SearchWiki’s first […]
A Search Engine Land reader points us toward the Science/Tech category of Google News, where, for the better part of the morning, a CNET news article about private rocketry was displaying with the headline, “Delicious.” Here’s a screenshot:
Google Is A Malware Site (Says Yahoo) from TechCrunch reports a funny bug at Yahoo that accidentally made it look like Google’s home page had Malware on it, based on the Yahoo SearchScan feature that was recently launched. A search for Astalavista at Yahoo returned what appeared to be a Google.com result in the 10th […]
Dow Jones reports (shorter Wall Street Journal version here) that some software developers are experiencing considerable frustration writing for Google’s much-touted Android mobile platform. “Functionality is not there, is poorly documented or just doesn’t work. It’s clearly not ready for prime time,” said one of the developers quoted in the story, which acknowledges that early […]
The Yahoo Search Marketing Blog announced that they have made several updates to their advertisers console. The changes include more custom reporting features with added scheduling options, easier navigation between detailed campaign pages, and a usability update to the calendar function. This upgrade seemed to have caused some issues with logging into the console as […]
Notice a bug in the Google web search results? If so, Matt Cutts wants you to report them to him on his blog. There is one big rule, Matt said: 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 […]
Philipp Lenssen reports that dozens if not hundreds of Google Personalized Home Page users have lost their personalized settings. As of now, I currently see my customized and tailored Google home page but literally hundreds of people are commenting at Google Blogoscoped, Digg.com and Google Groups about this exact issue.
I normally would not report bugs like these but the adCenter blog just posted an official confirmation of the bug I reported early this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable. The bug is that advertisers were being charged astronomical prices per click, even though they have set their bids lower. One example is an advertiser […]
After several emails from readers and spotting Jeremy Mayes post I have learned of a bug with Google’s new AdWords quality score algorithm. Google AdWords Adds Quality Score Column & To Improved Quality Algorithm from Wednesday warned us of the new changes coming but apparently there is a bug that makes good performing ads prices […]
Google announced that you can now pause individual ads or keywords in your AdWords accounts. Brad Geddes has screen captures showing how to do this visually. But Jeremy Mayes reports that some paused campaigns were not completely paused and advertisers were getting billed for clicks and impressions. Maybe the launch of the new AdWords feature […]
Send for the search party, Google gives a bum steer from the Sydney Morning Herald reports how the just launched service Google Australia Maps was dinged after someone discovered it turned a 30 second walk into a 18 minute car journey.
I am a huge Google News user, and at 10:08:42 AM (EST) this morning, Google News began flaking out for me. It was returning 500 errors, graphics weren’t loading, searches weren’t working and so on. I waited a bit and it came back, but then it had more issues. Philipp Lenssen has a unique screen […]
Via Threadwatch, Engadget’s summary of a serious bug in Google’s Gmail, where web sites can retrieve your Gmail contact list, through a JavaScript loophole, has now been fixed. The bug allowed web sites to pull your Google contact list, if you were still logged into your Google account and had JavaScript enabled (which is most […]
GigaOM and TechCrunch report that some Gmail users have noticed some or all of their mail has been deleted. Google has responded with an official statement, explaining there was a bug that affected about 60 Gmail users. Here’s the statement via GigaOM: