Display problems on Google serps

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Display problems on Google serps

only just happened.

Powdork

9:23 am on Sep 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

I've been watching my serps alot lately cuz I'm so excited. In the last hour or so I noticed that apostrophes are now displayed as little boxes. Wassup?

bird

11:27 am on Sep 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

Did you write them in the correct character set, as (hopefully!) declared in the meta tags of your pages?

Powdork

5:34 pm on Sep 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

No, it was in all the serps for a little while. All the apostrophes were showing up as little square boxes. Then it went back to normal.

Macguru

6:54 pm on Sep 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

Hi Powdork,

I believe what bird means by "correct character set" is a piece code that MUST be included on all pages of yous sites. Usually, it looks like this :

It should be in the <head> section of your page.

The important part is "charset=iso-8859-1" thing, since it can vary from languages used. For instance, a " ' " looks like a " ' " in your HTML code with "charset=iso-8859-1".

There is many variations possible. Both visitors browsers and search engines could misinterpret some characters without the tag. For instance, what is supposed to be french looks almost Chinese without a proper "Content-Type" definition.

Here is some week end reading [w3.org].

Enjoy

Powdork

7:09 pm on Sep 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

I understand that. I am saying it was all results presented by Google for all searches. If the description in the SERPs had an apostrophe for ANY result the apostrophe would be replaced with a little box type thingy that I can't recreate here. It only seemed to last a short while. It's also possible, however, that I was hallucinating. ;)

heini

7:24 pm on Sep 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

Yup, I've seen irregularities in Google serps myself some hours back. All the bluish links on top of the listings were displayed very small for a short time.

Macguru

7:28 pm on Sep 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

OK,

Then what was Google URL looking like? Did you clik on a link from here or elswere?

Lets say I want "L'apostrophe" on google tools bar :

the Url will look like :

[google.com...]

If I try the same query with the default setting of IE on my PC it will look like this:

[google.com...]

Do you see the difference?

If I try it on Opera's toolbar I get :

[google.com...]

And when I get using Google with Opera I get :

[google.com...]

Do you see any difference?

Powdork

7:39 pm on Sep 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

yes, Google switches between UTF-8 and iso-8859. I've understood (maybe incorrectly) that they tried to use more utf-8 earlier this year but it wasn't everything they had hoped for. I'm guessing it had something to do with this. However the results from strings with utf-8 in the string are displaying properly now.
I've never noticed the difference among browsers. I generally use ie 6 for searching cuz of the toolbar but check my sites in NN and opera for compatability. I have noticed that on IE Google searches seem to switch between the two for no apparent reason, although I haven't studied it.