Google Hacks

The No-Result Search (Prank)

Want to prank your friends using Google? These techniques that will make sure your search has no results.

Ah, pranking with a search engine. Nothing quite so much fun as befuddling your friends with some utterly weird search results. One fun and easy thing to do is make a search result that one would think is wildly popular and set it up so it has no results.

There are a couple ways you can set up the prank. The first way is to hack the URL. The second is to create a search that will never have a result.

Hacking the URL

To hack a URL so a query has no results, just add the following code to the end of a URL:

&num=-1

Even if a num modifer already exists in the URL, adding another to the end overrides the first value. The &num=-1 switch informs Google that you want -1 results. Because it’s not possible to return -1 results, Google will provide the next best thing: none.

Hacking the Search

Maybe you won’t have a chance to hack the URL, and you’ll need to hack the search instead. You can do that by creating a search with the special search codes that can’t have any results.

One easy way to create a no-result query is to add any two site: syntaxes to it:

site:org site:com

Google operates with a default AND; a single page in Google’s index can’t be simultaneously found from both the .org and .com domains.

Or you can search for a site you know doesn’t exist:

site:microsoft

While site:microsoft.com is a valid search for the site syntax, microsoft by itself ...