Google search was giving errors when searching “how many emojis on iOS”

[bubblehack3r]

UPDATE: Looks like it is fixed now - https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=ho...

[llui85]

Interesting.

"how many emojis on ios" - error

"how many emojis on apple" - error

"how many emojis on windows" - error

"how many emojis on macos" - working

"how many emojis on lumia" - error

"how many emojis lumia" - error

"how many emojis on linux" - working

"how many ios emoji" - working (albeit slowly)

"how many emojis on messages ios" - working

"how many emojis on ipados" - working

"how many emojis in ios" - error

"how many emojis inside ios" - error

"ios number of emojis" - working

"how many emojis on i" - working

"how many emojis on ios has" - error

"how many emojis on ios has does" - error

"how many emojis on ios has does how has does how has does how" - error

I'd hazard that a specific web page appearing in the results is probably causing this error - I would be very curious to find out which page this is.

Edit: Yep, a specific .com site seems to be causing it:

"how many emojis on ios site:com" - error

"how many emojis on ios site:aero" - works

[mirzap]

It seems that this site (emojipedia.org) broke the Google.

"how many emojis on ios -inurl:emojipedia.org"

trying to exclude other sites does not work:

how many emojis on ios -inurl:cnet.com

how many emojis on ios -inurl:wikipedia.org

[aerovistae]

pretty clever narrowing down of the problem, well done

[sabr]

"How many emoji on ios" works.

Wonder why "emojis" itself throws an error? I would expect the query understanding model to have the same result for the singular and plural forms

[soheil]

> Yep, a specific .com site seems to be causing it:

If you add a start date filter (even since 2000 years ago) it will work.

[hiergiltdiestfu]

can't reproduce your results. works for me..

[wzyoi]

org - error

io, net, ru - ok

[adunk]

After seeing this, I can't be the only one who got curious as to how many emojis there actually are on iOS.

Obviously, a quick google doesn't work right now.

So I did this to try to figure out: emojipedia.org, the site that supposedly breaks google, has a page that appears to show all the available emojis on iOS [1]. On this page, all except the first 21 emojis are displayed in a way that uses lazy loading of the images. These images are contained in <li class="lazyparent"> elements. Assuming that there are no other <li class="lazyparent"> elements on the page, we should get the number of emojis on iOS simply by counting those elements.

Opening up the console and running

  document.getElementsByClassName('lazyparent').length

gives us 4037. So the total number of emojis on iOS should be 4037 + 21 = 4058. If the above method is correct, that is.

[1] https://emojipedia.org/apple/

[NaughtyShiba]

You can also use `querySelectorAll` and also pass parent’s selector. Didn’t get to post while I was back at computer, so can’t recall exact selector, but number was same

[jraph]

Congratulations, your sentence "So the total number of emojis on iOS should be 4037 + 21 = 4058" is now used in the Google results.

[aerovistae]

I think my favorite part is that this is so outrageously unheard of that the error isn't even CSS-styled correctly. Zero left margin, just up against the edge of the window. Nobody even thinks about this case of an error being displayed because it's so rare.

[exikyut]

It also makes me think that there's probably broken ownership of the plumbing around the obviously-novel routing/layout/presentation path taken when this error is shown.

A while back while poking around I landed on an interstitial page of some kind using an old 2005-era Google logo, which was cute. Obviously nobody'd noticed and submitted the page in question to whatever bit of internal gunk was presumably used to track where the logo needed updating.

But that makes me wonder - the glitch I saw was a platform-level thing easily missed - but is Search that much of a vast, not-particularly-cohesively-integrated expanse too?

[soheil]

Can't be that unheard of. Here it is in 2020 https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/29809009/google-...

[faizshah]

All I can think about is the poor oncall engineer waking up to a latency alarm on a saturday night.

[throwaway892238]

My prediction is that engineers at Google will have been notified via Hacker News well before any internal system notifies them.

[seansmccullough]

Ya somebody is getting paged right now.

[soheil]

Google has offices in many timezones.

[aarestad]

I already reported this bug a couple days ago based on a similar query that a friend of mine to dome about.

[bubblehack3r]

This happens on google.com too:

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=ho...

[stncls]

This looks like a timeout.

- same request with "s" removed from "emojis": works, but in 5.03 seconds (!)

- "how many emoji symbols on ios": 1.37 seconds

Other modifications further decrease the request time.

[silisili]

It blows my mind that after a decade or so of dominance, they don't have a fast 'fail and remove from results' implemented.

[heshan666]

how many emojis in iOS works instantly, 100ms on the search request

[sleepychu]

Fascinating. "How many bananas on iOS" and "how many emojis on Android", "emojis on iOS" work fine.

Maybe the quantity question is running into an error trying to make one of those cards? Incredible that it just crashes search though.

[input_sh]

Including "how many" triggers an instant answer for sure.

Instant answer crawler tries to answer that question by parsing some site, fails in an unexpected way.

That'd be my theory.

[olliej]

"crash" here is likely just how the frontend reports a backend timeout.

[tech234a]

Startpage, which uses Google's search API, returns no results for this query [1], so it may not be an issue relating to Instant Answers.

[1]: https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?query=how+many+emojis+on...

[theK]

Would be definitely interesting to read a report on what triggers this error! I don’t think it is a tile error as presumably the backend that collects all the answers would be set up in a way that is resilient to upstream errors. So maybe the core results compiler?

[faizshah]

I'm not sure exactly how it works but if you look at the network requests for "how many emojis ios" vs "how many emojis android" the html for the initial page contains an internal server error whereas the android version contains some more javascript which contains the search results.

[shadowgovt]

The likeliest candidate is probably the final render step. Under the hood, search farms the query out to multiple backends, gathers partials from them, and then composites those partials into the final rendered page. For an actual 500 to surface to the user, that final compositing step is probably what fails; gathering and compositing are already robust against an individual backend failing to return a result.

I'm on board with other people's suggestions that asking a question like this is tripping over a site that surfaced an emoji in their site title that is choking the Unicode library that Google is relying upon.

[1f60c]

I don't think the public will ever learn what went wrong here, but whichever Googler fixes this will have one heck of a war story to tell over drinks.

[goforbg]

Server Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue. Please try again later.

[kbob]

Fixed in under three hours. Once again, the front page of HN is the most effective bug reporting mechanism.

[nashashmi]

We should put up Bug HN on the top head. And rank them for severity.

[swagmoney1606]

It appears to cause errors with my Google Home as well. Asking it "How many emojis on iOS?" (exactly the same as the OP string) causes my google home to stall for quite a bit (about 20 seconds or so).

All other queries resolve almost instantly.

[nestea-ca]

Looks like it was just fixed as I got an infinite load a few minutes ago but now it works fine. My fanciful guess is that they use a LM (language model) to determine if something is an answerable question and then if it is parse certain pages with an LM if it is classified as an answerable question. Maybe the LM stuttered on something on emojipedia.

[ummonk]

"how many emojis in ios" seems to trip it too

edit: so does "how many emojis ios" and "how many emojis apple" but not "how many emojis android"

[pastelsky]

Something to do with processing an unusually large number of emojis?

I wonder if processing emoji characters has any different performance characteristics than other UTF characters.

[captainmuon]

I would guess it has nothing to do with the index, and more with widgets - these special little result boxes that appear when you do a calculation, ask for the weather, and so on. Google has quite a few of them, and some are pretty whimsical. I read that new people on the search / frontpage team get to write on of those as a training task. They must be quite encapsulated from the rest of the system. But obviously at some point one of them is going to have a bug.

Just guessing, maybe it was supposed to show a certain emoji, like "hamburger emoji on iOS", and got tripped up by the result of a search like "how many site:emojipedia.org" which leads to the FAQ and that can't be parsed?

[soheil]

Server Error We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue.

Please try again later.

[Razengan]

"That day, we found a way to fight back..."

[greendude29]

Interestingly it crashes starting on "how many emojis on i"

[marsonya]

"how many emojis on p" also takes 5 seconds

[marsonya]

"how many emojis on e" takes 5 seconds

[marsonya]

"how many emojis on x" loads in 5 seconds

[marsonya]

"how many emojis on s" takes 5 seconds

[marsonya]

"how many emojis on l" takes 5 seconds too