I was searching for a colleague’s blog in a “legacy search engine” ;-)… and found a page in Kay Giza’s blog which linked “Niel Gräf” to somewhere. It wasn’t his blog, It was a linked “Live Search”:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?mkt=de-de&FORM=TOOLBR&q=“Nils+Gräf”&FORM=TOOLBR

Kay please don’t take it personal… What we see is a foreign page calling into Live without encoding the URL properly. That is what every non technical publisher will do - because they do not know better!

Clicking the link will open Live.com and will also show show results - If you have German language settings:

image

But if you click on “Next Page” to browse the results:

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If you have en-US settings you’ll get nothing:

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So what happens here?

  1. Live.com does not encode the user input properly when using it to format links - that’s bad!

  2. Live.com strips out special characters - not nice.

Hope there will be improvement soon :-)