Google Bug Skews URL

There’s a little bug with Google where if your search term contains the letter b, the display URL may have broken bold tags.

Here’s my post in reply to a topic at another site called Webproworld.

Why are you all getting mixed up in checking out spacing, tabs, degree symbols and whatnot?

It’s fairly simple to reproduce this bug with nothing special (at least where I am).

In many cases, you can just type any word followed by b.
For example, try a Google search for internet b – for me, the first result’s URL looks like

Code:

www.pcpitstop.com/<b>internetb>/Bandwidth.asp

It’s that easy – no degrees symbols, no special spacing.
It also seems obvious to me that it’s not a matter of Google caching the URL or anything complex like that. Within a single search, the URL is parsed for the first search term (in this case, internet). It’s adding

Code:

<b>and</b>

around the term. Then, when it goes through the URL a second time, it surrounds those b (bold) tags with additional bold tags – breaking the HTML.