July 3 at 11:34 am
- Link
Jere, Andrew Perry, Neil Saunders and Attila Csordas liked this
It seems that 130+ bases/chars and it returns this weird list of videos. Anything less, it doesn't return anything. - Ricardo Vidal
The maximum word length in Google appears to be 128 bytes (looks like they increased it after the llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch debacle). But I do wonder why there is this list of 10 videos that is returned for all queries that consist of words that are too long! - Eric Jain
it is crawling flash already? - Paulo Nuin
Looks like it is (e.g. http://google.com/search?q=fil...) though I don't think this can explain the mysterious YouTube videos. - Eric Jain
it might, if part of the movie coding has segments of the sequence in it. - Paulo Nuin
Maybe it assumes that if someone just mashed the keyboard randomly and typed some very long strings, they are bored, so why not give them some videos to watch ? - Andrew Perry
I checked, any sequence of random chars, 130+ renders that list of videos. The same videos :) - Ricardo Vidal
Hidden DNA sequences in a Snoop Dogg video? We may be on to something BIG here :-) But note that any term that is too long appears to result in the same list of videos. Also, while Google may now be extracting text from Flash content, I don't think they process Flash video. - Eric Jain
Talk about an easter egg. Question is how did you chance upon this wonderful discovery? What sequence did you put into the GOOG? - Deepak
It's a sequence from a Part from the partsregistry.org and we wanted to see if Google was indexing the sequences. Seems it isn't and what happens is the weird videos :) - Ricardo Vidal
Imagine if Google did index sequences. Proteomics researchers could abandon Mascot and identify their peptides via Google :) - Neil Saunders
Sorry to bring this up again but it seems google fixed whatever was retrieving those videos. It's no longer showing those funky results. - Ricardo Vidal
Nevermind, tried different lengths of chars and I'm getting youtube videos again. This is strange. Depending on the length of random chars, it returns different youtube video results. - Ricardo Vidal
Interesting: I seem to get the same 10 (or 2, if safe search is enabled) results for all strings > 128 bytes. Didn't do exhaustive testing though :-) - Eric Jain