The lamest search page ever

Monday 15 August 2005

I was helping a friend navigate the Xlibris web site: we were trying to find guidelines for formatting a poetry manuscript. After doing it the hard way (following links) for a while, I figured I would try their search for “poetry”. I was flabbergasted to see these results returned:

Search Results for ‘poetry’
Please note: if you are searching for a specific book or author, you should search in the bookstore
index.asp
wong.asp
index.asp
org.html
index.asp
index_apr2002.asp
faq_submissions.asp
events.asp
index.asp
faq_submissions.asp
index_mar2003.asp
index_mar2002.asp
index.asp

and so on. What year is this, 1993? Forget the relevant content of the pages with the search term highlighted, can’t we even get the titles of the pages? I did another search (I forget for what phrase) that returned “index.asp.bak” as one of the choices!

Comments

sil 8:47 AM on 15 Aug 2005

Gotta love the foo.asp.bak results, which are downloadable ASP code. Lovely. That site's not going to stay un0wned for long, is it?

Arjan 9:14 AM on 15 Aug 2005

Gotta love the foo.asp.bak results, which are downloadable ASP code

As a matter of fact, they seem so smart as to prevent this specific .bak file from being downloaded. Anyway, it stays a rather outdated search page...

Chet 9:43 AM on 15 Aug 2005

Search on "a+", "b+", etc. I am sure it wouldn't take much doing to decrypt the .TXT files stored in the "orderbackups" folder.

Pete Lyons 7:40 AM on 16 Aug 2005

Perhaps the search technology isn't completely to blame. None of the three pages I checked actually had a title.

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