What's wrong with quotes?

I can't search with quotes

[too much information]

This may be new, but I just tried a search using quotes and Google and yahoo both crash on it. Just a simple "person's name" and it returns nothing.

The strange thing is that the search box doesn't contain the searched terms in quotes but instead just a single set of quotes. Yahoo says, -No results found for search: "- and that's it.

What happened to my quotes? What happened to my search terms?

[Stefan]

Have you tried it with different browsers? Maybe the one you're trying with, (IE?), is buggy. Searching with quotes using IE is fine for me at the moment.

Try a restart and see if that helps, (if you haven't tried that already).

[GoogleGuy]

Very weird. I'd doublecheck the query, reboot your computer, try with a different browser, rig up a web form and test it, or try a different search engine--briefly, of course ;) . I just tried a search with quotes and it worked fine. It's also possible that you've got some scumware on your machine intercepting queries and not escaping them correctly. So you might want to run spybot--never hurts to check for spyware periodically anyway. Let us know if you figure it out, or write to help [at] google.com if it persists..

[nakulgoyal]

I had a friend call me and tell me this a few weeks back. I told him the same as what GoogleGuy wrote here. I don't know how it worked later. I never bothered, but it sure must have been a spyware/trojan or something.

I also saw on a machine of my friend, that if I searched for "XYZ" on Google, the page will load and with a flick, refresh and change a new #1 listing going to a particular PPC engine. the Title would always be XYZ Results or something like that.

Does Google have a way to prevent this kind of client side chnages with Google Result Pages?

[too much information]

Well I can't seem to get the same error again. (I'm using a Mac so I don't know if there is a spyware program for me.)

I didn't seem to have any problems with other programs at the time, so maybe it was just a temporary thing. I don't think it was an error on my part, the form would submit and come back as usual with only a " in the search box. The rest of the query was gone.

I have updated pages of my own where I cause a problem and then fix it while poor Joe Surfer get's caught in the mix. Maybe I hit that one data center at the wrong time? Either way it seems to be fixed now. If it happens again I will send an e-mail to the address you provided.

Thanks GG and everyone.