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What to do when you encounter "No results"

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Zhiming Wang edited this page Nov 16, 2019 · 1 revision

TL;DR: jump to the list of instructions.

Google sometimes change layouts, or push layout experiments to live users, invalidating googler's parsing strategy either temporarily or permanently. Whenever this happens, you may run into the "No results" problem consistently or intermittently. Rest assured that we want to fix these as much as you want to continue to enjoy googler, or more so. However, do realize that in the case of layout experiments, usually we can only wait it out.

There are several steps you can do to save everyone's time and get things fixed faster:

  1. Check to make sure your googler is the latest released version. Using an outdated version is by far the most common cause of "No results", and it's likely fixed in the latest version already, sometime ages ago. You can find your current version with googler --version. If your googler comes from a Linux distro repo and is outdated, here's the deal: we can hardly do anything about it. Please try the downloading a single file installation method.

  2. Go to the issue tracker and see if someone else already recently reported a similar problem. More likely than not someone else was experiencing the same problem and already reported it; you do not want us to waste time closing duplicates instead of fixing the issue. However, do NOT pile on an old, closed "no results" issue report. If it was closed, your problem is probably a new unrelated instance, and piling on an old issue adds nothing but confusion.

  3. Run googler with the --debug option. It will write the response from Google to a temporary file (see the "Response body written to" line in the debug output). Upload the file to a gist, or another snippet hosting service of your choice (do not use one that requires user to log in to download, please). When you report a bug, include both the full debug output and a link to the response. Since we might not be able to reproduce your problem (layout changes/experiments may be regional, small scale, etc.), we need the HTML to debug.

  4. Report the bug. See step 3.

  5. If you're savvy enough you can examine why the parser broke yourself. The actual parsing code is in the GoogleParser.parse method (search for "def parse"); it's short and accessible. Compare the parsing logic to the HTML you obtained in step 3. You can more easily inspect the DOM structure by opening the HTML with a web browser and using developer tools.

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