Google developers are puzzled as to why if someone types in a number sequence into the Google search they end up with hardcore porn.
Press reports confirm that if the user types in 4^(1/4)" they get many pages of porn links with titles like “four guys and a hooker”. It’s not just about the number four. Even if you type in other numbers it will also result in adult links. "1 2" -1, "1 2" -2, "h 3" –h, "1 4" -4, and “apple 1” – apple. Perhaps, the last request was discovered by a person manically typing in words connected to their favourite device, but it remains unclear how anyone else spotted the bug.
The phenomenon was first revealed on the search site Quora which has a question about what was causing this “equation porn” when the Internet users were searching for contradictory queries. The post in question was in January, but the engineers of the search giant have been unable to find an answer. One of the company developers explained that as a web search query, you can interpret [-4^(1/4)] as [-4 "1 4"], as in “Find me pages which contain a 1 next to a 4, but which do not contain a 4”. In other words, this should return no results, since it is obviously impossible to satisfy both requirements, but instead the search engine believes that some online pages match such contradictory queries. So, taking into account the fact that these appear the only results that “match” the query, they are the results that get shown to the user.
Industry observers suggest that one possible reason such contradictory queries return only adult links is because pornography website operators used a black hat search engine optimization technique. Google still provided no official comment.
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