Go home Google Groups, you’re drunk!!!

Well, as they say, no one’s perfect. Not even Google! Evidence: A recent “praise the iPad” bug in Google’s Text-To-Speech [0], which has reportedly, now been rectified, went unnoticed for months!

All the geeks out there must be familiar with the concept of bugs. May it be the =rand(200,99) bug in MS word, the famous “Why can’t I create a folder named ‘con’ in Windows” bug, or the Y2K mega-bug; geeks love bugs. Their impact can vary from funny to disastrous.

Coming to the point, we (PK and myself) recently discovered a bug in Google Groups, which made me feel rather “unpleasant.” We at Precog, run a mailing list, where all members of the group post about topics of common interest, related to security, privacy, and social media etc. Google Groups provides a nice summary of the total number of topics and posts circulated on the list for each month. Last month, that is May 2013, we hit our all-time-high (#PrecogRocks) in terms of topics and posts. PK and I went to the About page to check it out, and were rather shocked to see 183 posts for the month of June already! Terrible statistics, Google! Less than 2 hours into the month of June (IST), it does not seem humanly possible to make 183 posts, right? Given that our previous best was just over 300 for the previous month, this was definitely….. a “bug”!

Reverting to the “old” Google Groups revealed something totally different. The older interface reflected that we did not have a single post for June yet! That would be inaccurate, since both PK and I had posted on the mailing list just a few minutes ago. A possible explanation could be the difference in time zones. If Google works in some western time zone, then our posts were indeed in May (2am, June 1, 2013, IST would still be May 31, 2013 at many places on the planet). Well, if that’s the reason, how does one justify the 183 posts in June, 2013?

Feel free to write to us, if you have encountered a similar bug in the past. If you haven’t, we’d be glad if you can give it a shot! Stay glued to Google Groups, just past midnight on a month end, and check what’s going on! 🙂

Stay tuned for more “bug reports” from Precog@IIITD!

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PK and Prateek

[0] http://onefoottsunami.com/2013/01/04/android-issue-38538/