The following rant is really boring, but trying to work around it cost me over an hour of work time today. Grrrrr.
Between Friday and Monday, a feature of Google’s Advanced Search that I relied upon broke. Last week, you could enter a subdirectory of a site into the “Domain” text field and get search results from just that subdirectory. I had a few search boxes on sites that depended on this by passing along the as_sitesearch variable from the form. (as_sitesearch tended to work more reliably than the hq variable.) Now, however, if there is even a single virgule* in the URL (e.g. cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS, rather than cnn.com), Google does not return any results. Not sure whether this is just a temporary setback or a permanent change. Time to fire off an e-mail to Google.
*Virgule is my favorite synonym for the forward slash (/). Others include solidus, diagonal, and separatrix. However, I love that virgule is from the Latin virgula, meaning “little rod” or “little penis.” Etymology is fun!
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