1013702 - Google: Patent search will not work on mobile (phones)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[Mark Capella [:capella]]

Just noticed this oddness so I thought I'd get it in the queue ... I don't use my tablet a lot, so this might be a device dependent thing ...

On this page
   http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/letter-to-a-patent-troll-dear-piece-of-sht/?comments=1

About half way down in the comments, there's a response from author "Yakutat" with a link to a google search:
   https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts#q=ininv ... 22&tbm=pts

Clicking the link on my GS3 brings me to an empty google page, no search text in the input field, no results, etc...
   https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7af1bag8dvaysp/linkBugGS3.png

Clicking on my tablet displays the entire page.
   https://www.dropbox.com/s/625kmzkgkxhn2wm/linkBugN7.png

Comment 1

[Mark Capella [:capella]]

Requesting verification of what I'm seeing

Comment 2

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

This is some awkward evangelism issue.

The URL that the commenter posts to is:

https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts#q=ininventor:%22Christopher+R+Hulls%22&tbm=pts

With the user-agent [1] opening the link directly on my phone (32.0a1/4.4.2) takes me to the front-page of Google [1]. With the 'Mobile' token swapped to 'Tablet', as confirmed on desktop, the page will load.

[1] Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:30.0) Gecko/30.0 Firefox/30.0

Comment 3

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Oh yeah their Google Patent search straight up doesn't work in Nightly. Any search produces empty results.

https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts

Comment 4

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Indeed, there are no results sent to us in Nightly or current stable, and the markup shows they send us a <table> full of empty child elements. This is entirely different from the markup served to Chrome Mobile, or Nightly with a spoofed User-Agent.

Comment 5

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Contacted Alex and Google folks.

Comment 6

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

In Google tracker

> Our engineers were able to reproduce the bug, and we're now tracking it in internal issue #15409126 (for your reference).

Comment 7

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

We haven't had any feedback since that mail.
The page which is sent to Chrome Mobile is working on Gecko (When faking the UA).

Comment 8

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Google Patent search returns an empty result in Firefox Nightly with Android version number.

Comment 9

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Still broken as of today.

Comment 10

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

This is working for me now.

Comment 11

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Attachment: google-patent-search.png