Google's seach algorithms are sure to be among the best in the world, and allow for much more than most people realize (like searching for pages containing certain keywords while excluding others). However all that complexity also comes with some bugs attached, like the one that was now found which returns results that might be inappropriate for underage users.
Someone that was search for math expressions decided to search for "-4^(1/4)". A search query that Google interprets as: -4 "4 1", and that is interpreted as "find me pages which contain a 1 next to a 4, but which do not contain a 4". An impossible match, as you can't find a page that has a 4 in it, but doesn't have it at the same time.
However this search expression does returns results... but not very mathematical ones. The results its shows are for porn pages and show up even of you have safe search enabled (which should filter out all those results).
Google is now working to fix this bug as quickly as possible, but until then do watch out if your kids are taking a long time using Google while doing their math homework.
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