[OT] Interesting Google Search

Michael Schwarz on Monday, March 6, 2006

Today I got an error message in .NET 2.0 ("Failed to start monitoring changes to...", error code -2147023570). Try to search for this error code with Google you will get a funny result: Click here [1]. I could only get the root page of all the domains, no page could be found that was not the default web server page, no file in a subfolder. In the top you will ses that there are about 9.670.000.000 including this number. You can find this number if you click on the cached version of the search result, the url of the cached item will look like this:

http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:M0kw1cwIZTUJ:www.mydomain.com/+-2147023570&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4

If you add site:.de [2] to your search you get a list of domains only from the German TLD, and again only domain entry pages.

On thing i noticed, too, was the special section in the Google search results first page. If you entered a wrong search text and Google thinks that you mean something different, you get a notice: "Did you mean: XYZ". But if you search for -2147023570 you get a section (separated by a line) that says: "See results for 2147023570". There you will see three links that are not the domain entry pages, and this section I never saw.

Did you know what this "error number" causes Google to show only domains? Do you have other similar search queries?