I've seen it come back with something along the lines of "it looks like there's not a lot matches" with some useless cartoon graphic.
I see this a lot when searching for phone numbers. I've also seen the opposite like the forced "find something no matter how terrible of a match to avoid no results" as being described. You search for a number and no exact matches, but it returns things with different area codes same prefix different numbers. Or same area code, different prefix, same numbers. Or some such randomness that I can't even venture a guess as to why it thought the not one number matches would be interesting to me. Unless you're brave, I'd suggest not searching for random phone numbers with Safe Search off as you'll find some very interesting pages displayed that have absolutely nothing to do with the number being searched.
Comments
Is there anyway we can somehow find out that is true?
I could have sworn google always was happy to return some odd url matches, typically when the given results weren't great.
I remember when Googlewhacks[0] used to be a thing. Zero result search queries weren't interesting enough because they were too easy to find.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack
I've seen it come back with something along the lines of "it looks like there's not a lot matches" with some useless cartoon graphic.
I see this a lot when searching for phone numbers. I've also seen the opposite like the forced "find something no matter how terrible of a match to avoid no results" as being described. You search for a number and no exact matches, but it returns things with different area codes same prefix different numbers. Or same area code, different prefix, same numbers. Or some such randomness that I can't even venture a guess as to why it thought the not one number matches would be interesting to me. Unless you're brave, I'd suggest not searching for random phone numbers with Safe Search off as you'll find some very interesting pages displayed that have absolutely nothing to do with the number being searched.
There was at one time a kind of game where you tried to find a search term that would return only say 3 results. It was hard, but some did get found.
Having said that I have recently had some kind of "nothing found" result on several occasions. So it still happens.
--edit--
In fact I just tried "ca7112b7167c15e621412c0fbc0a6c9" (omitting the last digit to avoid HN) and got:
Your search - "ca7112b7167c15e621412c0fbc0a6c9" - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
Make sure that all words are spelled correctly. Try different keywords. Try more general keywords.
Google-Whack as I knew it.
Where you tried to find only a search with one result.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack
Unless you have a time machine there's only anecdotal evidence, but there's plenty of it on HN. Seen many comments here reporting the same thing.
Just do an image search for "google search returned no results screenshot". Plenty of examples.