weird google search behavior

modifying the appearance of a google search result page.

[funkytastic]

Don't ask me how I stumbled upon this...
I discovered that if you prepend the characters %E3%91%86 (three bytes in hex) to the keyword in a google web search, it performs the search normally but highlights the keyword you requested in red throughout the page (rather than the usual bold).

For example:

[google.com...]

It seems to work only if the encoding is set to UTF-8. It might work or do other things with different prepended characters, I haven't tried many. On some systems the three bytes might show up as an asian character.

Any idea what this is about?

[webnewton]

this is intresting!

[funkytastic]

Yeah, i've been testing it and the lowest set of bytes it seems to work with in this range is %E3%90%80.

Pretty odd, I'd say.