# What the heck is a "Glimpse Error"?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-heck-is-a-glimpse-error/103819>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [April 15, 2002, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-heck-is-a-glimpse-error/103819 "2002-04-15T20:49:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Flamsterette\_X](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/41988e/32.png) [@Flamsterette\_X](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flamsterette_X)\
**Post date:** [April 15, 2002, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-heck-is-a-glimpse-error/103819/1 "2002-04-15T20:49:31Z")

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I was trying to search for the word “lipogram” on [A Word A Day](http://wordsmith.org/awad/search.html) (in the words and quotes archives only) , and I got this back from the search engine:

Glimpse error  
The search parameters caused an error in the call to Glimpse.  
Please try your search again with different parameters.

* * *

Output from Glimpse:

Can anyone tell me what this means?

Oh, and I also got it when I tried searching for other words; just in case the word “lipogram” caused the search engine to hang. And just in case I was searchng using the wrong index, I also tried my search using the “whole site minus words and quotes”… same thing. Does anyone know what it is, or is the search engine just not working? 😕 😕

P.S. I’ve used this search engine before with no problem at all, until now…

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**Author:** ![DMC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dmc/32/18049_2.png) [@DMC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMC)\
**Post date:** [April 15, 2002, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-heck-is-a-glimpse-error/103819/2 "2002-04-15T22:00:06Z")

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Glimpse is an indexing system that allows you to do text searches in a group of files.

The most likely cause of that error is that there were 0 matches for the word you searched for, and the programmers of the A Word A Day site didn’t properly code for that condition. I was able to get the site to produce that error every time I entered any obscure (but correctly spelled word), that was unlikely to be in any of their files. On more common words, it brought up matches every time.

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**Author:** ![Flamsterette\_X](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/41988e/32.png) [@Flamsterette\_X](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flamsterette_X)\
**Post date:** [April 16, 2002, 4:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-heck-is-a-glimpse-error/103819/3 "2002-04-16T04:59:39Z")

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Thanks for the help, **DMC** … I’ll go try that now, in fact. Hey, it worked! Cool!