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Department of Foobar >> Contact details
(where the >> is actually a single character)
[this is what appears in the window heading in a webbrowser, or in google's main title in the listings]
it is now showing as the somewhat unprofessional-looking:
Department of Foobar? Contact details
(the question mark actually shows twice - but this forum doesn't seem to accept me typing this in..)
Has anyone else found this, and why has google changed its algorithm to break this? Surely » is legal HTML? (And all my pages are valid XHTML)
could be coincidence, but so far, the only computers it's messed up on are running IE 6.0+
all 5.5's I've tried it on display the chars the proper way.
Type » into google and you get a blank page. Never seen one of those before.
you get a blank page searching for any character that google sees as a space. including, a space.
But it's always been that way hasn't it?
I still think it's an IE thing, unless someone's seeing something I don't?
(NB - I had avoided » because this is less well supported by older browsers.)
I get the same effect on mozilla as IE, so I really don't think it's a browser issue, especially as it was fine before.
pretty open to possibilities I'd say.
what's strange is, FAST always had a problem with these characters (but fortunately replaced them with spaces instead of question marks) for the longest time. Just recently a site which uses double < on either side of the title shows the correct character trailing the title, but a space before it.
so while FAST has almost fixed their problem, google's gone from just fine to... all wrong.
emailed google. I'll keep the three of us in the world who are intersted, posted ;)
its a strange thing because during the update i saw the characters presented correctly occasionally on ww2... oh well.
no reply from search-quality@ ... but i was in a mood and called the example serps kinda ugly, maybe they got offended :)
I already format the entire process of web site creation based around what they like... c'mon.
I hope this isn't the real reason for inaction..
What do you mean?
They're probably just taking a while to look into it. There's probably a bug that's made its way into some of the servers, hence the inconsistencies.
It is a very annoying bug, though.
They have question marks in place of characters flying all around their results pages... the pages that are google's main product... and it's not an addressable issue?
This bug hasn't resolved itself yet, and now I see it in the SERPs at bbc.co.uk, and aol.com
But that doesn't answer your question. I couldn't tell if people think it's an escaping problem with Google snippets, escaping on queries, or exactly what. Probably the best way is to give an exact search that fails. Also it's good to say what browser platform you see the problem on.
As far as doing a search for the single char '»' many of those chars are treated as spaces. If someone can make a compelling case for why people need to search for that character, it might be worth changing.
Glad you've picked up this thread.
To clarify - the issue is when the character appears in the <title> tag of the page, which therefore appears as the main highlighted entry in google's results. Instead of appearing as a >> it appears as?
I'm 99.9% positive it's a problem with Google for several reasons: it was working before, it works in other search engines, and the pages concerned are valid XHTML (the page titles themselves therefore appears correctly in all browsers). Furthermore, occasionally, google's results become correct, as if it was only affecting certain servers in your server farm, but this is only sporadic.
Examples: do a search for
[google.com...]
or for
[google.com...]
These give several examples of this problem. Searching within any of the sites concerned also shows how widespread it it.
I get the same bug when searching using IE6 or NN4.7 or Mozilla (all on Win2000 - I don't have a mac or linux shell to hand).
Feel free to sticky me if you would like more specific info. I'm wary of breaking the rules on revealing site info.
Martin
and thanks for looking into GG.
Sticky me if you want an example.
GoogleGuy, do you agree there is a bug here?
Google is reading the characters normally for me atm.
is the problem solved?
showing up right at the bbc.co.uk feed also... looking good!
I'll check periodically to check it's not a server fluctuation reverting back to the double-? as before.
