A bug in Google search — fortunately, a rare one — gives porn links and images as results when the user puts certain mathematical equations into the search box. It's certainly strange, but there is an explanation.
It was discovered by a user of the Q&A site Quora, who wrote a question asking why the search "-4^(1/4)" should return not just the result of that equation but hundreds of links to a wide variety of porn sites.
The search still works, and you can try it yourself, although if you're at work, you might want to wait until the boss is out of sight. Results are similarly inappropriate with image search.
So what's happening here? Another user of Quora (who stayed anonymous to avoid being associated with porn by Google, clearly a serious risk) broke it down. Google calculates the numerical query as it should, but also runs it as a normal text search as well, just in case. When it does that, it interprets things differently: the parentheses act like quote marks and the negative sign is used to exclude unwanted words from results.
The end result is that Google tries to find pages that have a 1 and a 4 next to each other... but no 4s. Obviously there are no pages that both have and don't have a 4, and as Google search engineer Jeremy Hoffman showed up at Quora to explain, it should return no results.
Instead, the bug results in these porn sites being shown, which have been extensively optimized to show up on as many searches as possible, even unrelated ones. The optimization is so strong that porn is showing up even for queries that don't make sense! Other contradictory queries return porn results, but not all.
Google declined to comment to NBC News. But the Google engineer who answered the question says that a bug fix is on the way, so you can calculate on Google with no fear of smutty links clogging up your results.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.
