Bugs: nobody is perfect (or: Google is broken)

We are trying to release a product without bugs (duh!) but we are sure that we will have our fair share them when we go live. That’s just the way it works. So it’s comforting to see that even Google still has it’s bugs. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself:

Go to Google
Click on Advanced Search [http://www.google.com/advanced_search]
Go to the “Page-Specific Search” field
Enter ‘www.fleck.com’ in the field titled “Links”
Do a search.
Nothing..

Now do it again but on the result page add one space between ‘link:’ and ‘www.fleck.com’ and search again. Aha! 578 results! Try again for any URL…

So somehow that damn search field only works with a space between those links. I tried it on several browsers and on a mac and on a PC. Same thing everywhere. If you try Google.com without a space you get 3.5 million results. Add the space and you will get 14.5 million results…

A market cap of 126 billion dollars and there is still room for bugs. Cool…

UPDATE: Loren Baker from Searchenginejournal.com took the time to explain what the real problem is. It turns out the Google form itself isn’t buggy but the Link Tracking Search is. Although Google knows that there are hundreds of pages linking to Fleck.com and shows this in an normal search (try ‘fleck’ and see the 5th link) it suddenly forgets this when you use the Link Tracking feature.

Loren Baker: ‘Yep Boris, that’s the bug, Google’s link tracking is more or less broken. It’s kinda old news for the SEO types out there’

Sigh, and I thought I was on to something.