You can break Google search by searching for ‘compare the market’

Google returns "Server Error" for a query for the past 6+ hours.

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Google Compare The Market

Update: Google fixed this issue sometime around 3am EDT Friday. And then at around 11am EDT Friday it is broken again.

Go to Google and search for the keyword phrase [compare the market] on desktop or mobile, and you will see Google just break down. It is rare to ever see Google not be able to provide the answer to your query, but here is one case where Google simply cannot process the answer for you.

As you can see above, Google responds with a message that reads:

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.

Google has been aware of the issue since around 3:30pm EDT Thursday but has yet to fix the issue. That is over six hours of time where Google cannot return a result for a pretty basic query.

Danny Sullivan of Google said on Twitter “It’s a server error — just like it says. Server errors sometimes happen. We’re investigating.”

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1040322842867335168

So hopefully it will be resolved soon, but it is very unusual to ever see an example where Google returns this error, and for such a long period of time.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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