Google's secret 'porn equation': -4^(1/4)

Ask Google an impossible question and you just may get a list of porn links in return. The unusual situation is due to a bug in Google's ability to process equations, Google software engineer Jeremy Hoffman said in reply to a post on Quora.com. "We are working on a bug fix," he said. A separate article on The Verge said this could be a combination of the bug and "nefarious search engine optimization (SEO)" by some porn sites. The Verge also pointed out the porn links won't show once Google's SafeSearch is turned on. Citing the example posted on Quora, searching for "-4^(1/4)" will give Google's calculator with the correct answer, "-1.41421356237," but also with several porn links thrown into the mix. "Somehow, Google's search engine thinks that these porn sites are the most relevant results for any numerical reductio ad absurdum. As for why these pages appear instead of something more innocuous, that's less clear. The most obvious answer would be spammy SEO," The Verge said. It said the porn sites may not have targeted this bug, but "by casting a wide net of links across the internet, they appear to be benefiting from it." "Solving the immediate problem of not returning results for impossible searches will be much easier than fixing the SEO spam issue — but Google will need to tackle both," it added. —TJD, GMA News