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Google found a way to crash Internet Explorer
Ok today I came accross something really weird. I was trying to find information on setting up my own mail server using PostFix. No problem really, just used Google search to find the information.
The strange crashes started happening once I found a page that didn’t contain the information I needed and I hit the back button. Every single time I did this Google crashed my tab with some type of cross scripting warning. Even when IE tried to recover the tab it crashed again. After the second crash IE just said, slightly paraphrased, ‘f*ck it the website keeps crashing go somewhere else instead!’.
So here is the steps to reproduce (as it crashed every single time):
- Use Internet Explorer 8
- Have multiple tabs open, I had at least two in a google search result
- I was logged into personalized search, don’t know if it is relevant but hey you never know
- Click on of the search results
- Hit the back button, or the backspace key
- Presto crasho.
Always fun to see how some javascript can crash a Internet Explorer tab. I am at least presuming it is caused by javascript.
Google Doesn’t Like .0 extension
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Loading ...We all know that search engines have strange quirkes when it comes to filtering the indexes they have. Well very recently it came to my attention that Google has added some new extensions to the filter list.
We already new that files with .exe, .dll and .lib were being filtered from the search results. Which I think is a good thing, as it protects the visitors from potential harm. But just a few days back I got word that Google is now also banning or blocking pages ending on .0.
Some examples are:
- The wikipedia page Web 2.0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0) ending in .0 is no longer showing up in the search results, rather the page ending in 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2).
- The Seomoz page for Web 2.0 has disappeared from the results. Instead the summary page is listed.
After some chatter about the issue around the internet and blogs Matt Cutts wrote a quick entry in his blog as to why they have been removed from the search results. Read it at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dont-end-your-urls-with-exe/.
So for know try to avoid ending Url’s with .0 or any of the already known blocked extensions.
Building a PHP search indexer
I’ve been working on a demo website called MovServDex for quite some years now. I’m calling it a demo website, but it’s really a fully featured website on TV shows and movies. In the latest version I have decided to add a search engine. In this post I’ll shed some light on how you can create a PHP script that will ‘crawl’ the web for pages.
Before I continue please note that this is not meant to be a replacement for a real search engine like Google. But it may be useful for you to use on your own website.
