A reader alerted me to a problem with Google Places (aka LBC) where a record is currently unable to be created or edited and the lister receives the message: “Error on Page”. A number of posters (~30) have noted the problem in the forum over the past 36 hours.

Here are a sampling of the posts taken from my RSS feed:

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Google’s Joel Headly has responded to the posters, acknowledged the issue and consolidated the postings here.

Apparently, the problem is IE specific and a switch to Chrome allows the editing to continue:

Thanks for letting us know. This issue may be unique to Internet Explorer. We’re currently looking into a fix now. You can consider it a known issue at this point. It may take us a bit to put a fix into the product. For now, the best work around mentioned is to use another browser (people have reported success with Chrome & Firefox).

I’m going to merge other threads with this one.

We already can reproduce the issue in Internet Explorer 7. If folks see it in other browsers, please let us know.

This issue though brings to light a larger issue: The search function in the forums suck. The reader who asked about the problem was surprised that I was able to identify so many with the same problem so quickly. She noted: “Hmmm I went to the help section and searched on “error on page message” and returned items from 2009. I’ll have to check and see what I’m doing wrong here.”

It is a problem that I too have.

Obviously when a user comes to the forum they either want the answer to their issue in the Help files, want to see that others in the forums are experiencing the same problem or perhaps that others have in fact answered the problem. Google forum search function somehow doesn’t seem to help that much with any of the issues.

For some reason they have a bimodal, dual button search in the forum where a user needs to select between “Search Google Help” and a “Power Search” and all too often when you really want to search the forums you end up searching the Help Files: (this is only visible to TCs) It isn’t clear why there are two types of search rather than the single search field ala the main Google search page, but even if you choose “Power Search” the results are frequently less than satisfying often showing ancient rather than recent results.

The results of frequently irrelevant. There is no opportunity to modify the search or reorder them in any way. It would be nice for example to set date parameters or to order by relevancy or date.

My tip of the day? To circumvent the issue I either search my copy in Mail of the RSS feeds for the forum or do a site search at Google com with the format: site:http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Places/ “error on page” . Inevetitably, a site search on Google proper will return significantly better results that the search function within the forums.