Google Search is timing out when users search for specific terms like “How many emojis on iOS,” “How many emojis on Apple” and “How many emojis on Windows.”
BleepingComputer was able to reproduce the issue on both Google search sites and the mobile app. We observed server errors when looking up these terms, without any quotes or punctuation.
A freeze emoji!
Google Search is throwing a server error, shown below, after timing out as users search for phrases like “how many emojis on iOS” or “How many emojis on Apple” (no quotes).
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.
The issue was originally thought to be impacting a country-specific domain, Google.co.nz when reported by YCombinator Hacker News user wfme.
However, keen commentators quickly pointed out that Google.com was also impacted, as further confirmed by BleepingComputer.
Another user, llui85 compiled a list of some phrases that seem to be triggering the issue on Google search, when entered in the search bar without quotes:
“how many emojis on ios”
“how many emojis on apple”
“how many emojis on windows”
“how many emojis on lumia”
“how many emojis lumia”
“how many ios emoji” – working (albeit slowly)
“how many emojis in ios”
“how many emojis inside ios”
“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,” suspects the user, who after looking up the following term seems even more convinced that a particular .com site is causing the issue:
how many emojis on ios site:com
The behavior is also being exhibited by the Google Search Android app:
BleepingComputer has reached out to Google prior to publishing to understand the root cause of the issue and we are waiting to hear back.
