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Blank SERP

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

Monday, March 19, 2007
17 years ago2,326 views

http://images.google.com/images?q=system+driver

[ via http://digg.com/programming/System_Driver_Google_Search_Bug]

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

The name of the digg submitter is quite fitting :)

And yes, that's odd.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

It's not blank here anymore, if that was what happened...

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

It's blank for me but I suspect that's because I'm getting a JS error. I'm guessing Google's new way of creating the Image SERPs using JavaScript isn't completely bug-free...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

What's the error Tony, and which browser?

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Line: 59
Char: 9708
Error: Expected ')'
Code: 0
URL: http://images.google.com/images?q=system+driver

IE6. If I had more time, I'd trawl through all that JavaScript and find what could be causing it but Google aren't paying me enough to do that! :-)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Weird, can't reproduce it, not with IE6, IE7, or FF2. I'm curious because of possible XSS holes or so.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Weird, I'm getting the same error in FF2:

Error: missing) after argument list
Source File: http://images.google.com/images?q=system+driver
Line: 58, Column: 208

Here's the bit of code that's causing the error:

dyn.Img("...","","...","...","...","...","<b>...</b> <b>System</b>DriversFTUSBToSerial","","","567 x 362 – 25k","jpg","www.innervations.com","","","...");

(Some parameters have been replaced with ... for easy reading.)

Quite simply, Google aren't escaping backslashes when they write the snippet to the JavaScript. I don't think this is a security issue though; it's just buggy code...

Mambo [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

i've got a blank screen, without any JS errors.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Mambo, are you sure? FF2 doesn't alert me of any JS errors either – but I was using the Web Developer Toolbar to identify the errors.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

By the way, not to scare anyone, but unescaped characters are a pretty good way to launch an HTM injection, which can cause XSS vulnerabilites. :) Not sure in this case, but just generally speaking...

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Only on Google India? (Google.com works)
http://images.google.co.in/images?q=system+driver&svnum=10

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