Google being coy?

This is a bit weird and maybe nobody can reproduce it but I do have my mental faculties I promise! I searched for the word 'coy' in google just now and got:

Server Error
The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.
If the problem persists, please mail [email protected] and mention this error message and the query that caused it.

Ok I thought, maybe google are having probs at the moment (although it's rare). Then I searched for something else and it worked. How strange, thinks I, I wonder if it's too short at 3 letters. So I tried searching for other 3 letter words - no problem.

I tried searching for 'coy' in 2 other browsers, no problem again. So this is only happening in my Firefox, which is version 3.6 but with it's user-agent set to Firefox2.0

If anybody can be bothered, can you try it please? From my testing I'd imagine that most of you will just get normal search results, I'm just trying to see if anybody else gets the error I did.

I have tried this about 10 times over the past 15 mins or so and am getting the same result every time.

I'm not suggesting anything untoward (hence posting in general chitchat) but I just found it to be curious and mildly amusing because of the fact that it was 'coy' I was searching for.

Here is a screen grab although of course it would have been easy to fake. Please trust me that I really couldn't be bothered to fake something as mundane as this!

reply to post by morkington


works fine for me, though the wiki link isn't at the top as normal, actually it's fairly far down my list.

I also just noticed that google.com is continually sending me to google.ca the instant I type a character into the search field.

Firefox google start page is also working fine.

reply to post by phishyblankwaters


ah ok, I don't get any of those things like the wiki links (I'm old-fashioned, thats why I change the user-agent string so sites tend to feed me simpler versions without the bells and whistles)

Thanks for the reply