UPDATE:
Looks like it is fixed now - <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=how+many+emojis+on+ios" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=ho...</a>
Interesting.<p>"how many emojis on ios" - error<p>"how many emojis on apple" - error<p>"how many emojis on windows" - error<p>"how many emojis on macos" - working<p>"how many emojis on lumia" - error<p>"how many emojis lumia" - error<p>"how many emojis on linux" - working<p>"how many ios emoji" - working (albeit slowly)<p>"how many emojis on messages ios" - working<p>"how many emojis on ipados" - working<p>"how many emojis in ios" - error<p>"how many emojis inside ios" - error<p>"ios number of emojis" - working<p>"how many emojis on i" - working<p>"how many emojis on ios has" - error<p>"how many emojis on ios has does" - error<p>"how many emojis on ios has does how has does how has does how" - error<p>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.<p>Edit: Yep, a specific .com site seems to be causing it:<p>"how many emojis on ios site:com" - error<p>"how many emojis on ios site:aero" - works
After seeing this, I can't be the only one who got curious as to how many emojis there actually are on iOS.<p>Obviously, a quick google doesn't work right now.<p>So I did this to try to figure out: emojipedia.org, the site that supposedly breaks google, has a page that appears to show all the available emojis on iOS [1]. On this page, all except the first 21 emojis are displayed in a way that uses lazy loading of the images. These images are contained in <li class="lazyparent"> elements. Assuming that there are no other <li class="lazyparent"> elements on the page, we should get the number of emojis on iOS simply by counting those elements.<p>Opening up the console and running<p><pre><code> document.getElementsByClassName('lazyparent').length
</code></pre>
gives us 4037. So the total number of emojis on iOS should be 4037 + 21 = 4058. If the above method is correct, that is.<p>[1] <a href="https://emojipedia.org/apple/" rel="nofollow">https://emojipedia.org/apple/</a>
I think my favorite part is that this is so outrageously unheard of that the error isn't even CSS-styled correctly. Zero left margin, just up against the edge of the window. Nobody even thinks about this case of an error being displayed because it's so rare.
This happens on google.com too:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=how+many+emojis+on+ios" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+emojis+on+ios&oq=ho...</a>
This looks like a timeout.<p>- same request with "s" removed from "emojis": works, but in 5.03 seconds (!)<p>- "how many emoji symbols on ios":
1.37 seconds<p>Other modifications further decrease the request time.
Fascinating. "How many bananas on iOS" and "how many emojis on Android", "emojis on iOS" work fine.<p>Maybe the quantity question is running into an error trying to make one of those cards? Incredible that it just crashes search though.
Startpage, which uses Google's search API, returns no results for this query [1], so it may not be an issue relating to Instant Answers.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?query=how+many+emojis+on+ios" rel="nofollow">https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?query=how+many+emojis+on...</a>
Would be definitely interesting to read a report on what triggers this error! I don’t think it is a tile error as presumably the backend that collects all the answers would be set up in a way that is resilient to upstream errors. So maybe the core results compiler?
Server Error
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.
It appears to cause errors with my Google Home as well. Asking it "How many emojis on iOS?" (exactly the same as the OP string) causes my google home to stall for quite a bit (about 20 seconds or so).<p>All other queries resolve almost instantly.
Looks like it was just fixed as I got an infinite load a few minutes ago but now it works fine. My fanciful guess is that they use a LM (language model) to determine if something is an answerable question and then if it is parse certain pages with an LM if it is classified as an answerable question. Maybe the LM stuttered on something on emojipedia.
"how many emojis in ios" seems to trip it too<p>edit: so does "how many emojis ios" and "how many emojis apple" but not "how many emojis android"
Something to do with processing an unusually large number of emojis?<p>I wonder if processing emoji characters has any different performance characteristics than other UTF characters.
I would guess it has nothing to do with the index, and more with widgets - these special little result boxes that appear when you do a calculation, ask for the weather, and so on. Google has quite a few of them, and some are pretty whimsical. I read that new people on the search / frontpage team get to write on of those as a training task. They must be quite encapsulated from the rest of the system. But obviously at some point one of them is going to have a bug.<p>Just guessing, maybe it was supposed to show a certain emoji, like "hamburger emoji on iOS", and got tripped up by the result of a search like "how many site:emojipedia.org" which leads to the FAQ and that can't be parsed?
Server Error
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.<p>Please try again later.
Fascinating! It may be trying to create that response panel on the top with the absolute number but maybe it's erroring out when trying to parse the actual Unicode points.
According to this <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393051" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393051</a> , a couple years ago people were getting the "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." and it was because of a fireball?
Searching through Google translate loads the page but without content:<p><a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&u=https://www.google.com/search?q%3Dhow%2Bmany%2Bemojis%2Bon%2Bios%26oq%3Dhow%2Bmany%2Bemojis%2Bon%2Bios&client=webapp" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&u=h...</a>
Same exact error message appearing on Google Scholar in 2015 <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33741372/google-server-gives-a-server-error-with-the-first-request-in-private-browsing-mo" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33741372/google-server-g...</a>
Not only on .nz ... this happens on the main site google.com too. Displaying the message "Server Error : Internal server error..." after spending a long time for the page to download.<p>That indicates every search we are making might be triggering a high CPU load somewhere before displaying the message.
Getting the following now:<p><i>Server Error
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.</i>
Related discussion from a few months ago <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393051" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32393051</a>
My guess is this is related to instant answers section at the top of the search results. It's trying to figure out the count, but it's failing for one reason or another.
Sounds like they are recognizing and redirecting searches to specific functions. It is obvious but with this error we can make a conjecture that some of these functions are written as multiple code snippets without too much engineering responsability.<p>Just my two cents remembering Google acquisition of Freebase and a quest for understanding content at a higher level (e.g. number of retweets in a tweet).
My guess: when you search, google fires up several background processes/threads for that query.<p>Not only search, but also for a quick answers, maps, ads. These services might be slower than the search query or a max response time, in which case they get ignored.<p>When the search query finished, they might wait a few milliseconds for the other services, if it’s still under the target response time. After that google will render the results with all info that completed.<p>My guess is that one of these services crashes, most likely the main search one. This way you can wait forever for it to finish.<p>So it’s probably a bug in the way it’s yielding/waiting for the spawned processes.<p>Other option is that for certain processes they don’t spawn a background process, because it’s faster to run locally/direct/in-memory, because the data is quite small and just rums on every node.
they’d start this after spawning the other processes, so if this service returns an error, it might screw up the yielding/waiting/collecting, although I’d expect an exception/error page instead of the indefinite waiting that’s happening