If you google a space, you get a very weird assortment of 40-50 search results. What exactly is shown varies a bit, but I usually get the Wikipedia home page (in the , Wikipedia pages for some special characters like !, and a few YouTube videos. Other pages include
- The Wikipedia disambiguation page "This"
- The BBC home page
- a dictionary page explaining the word "rubella" (a disease)
- A Soundcloud user page who's user name only consists of special characters
The same results are shown for other kinds of spaces like the non-breaking space, and for control characters like DEL - so it seems like they are normalized to some kind of "empty word".
It seems like special characters are a common theme, but there are exceptions like the BBC home page. Also, the low number of results (typically 40-50, sometimes 80), suggests that it's something very specific or related to a bug.
Is there any public explanation of this phenomenon? What do these (very few) pages have in common?