Fairly frequently when searching for something in Safari, I get a page that says ‘Safari can’t open the page… Safari can’t open the page “[text]%20[text]%20[text]%20[text]” because the page’s address isn’t valid.’
“%20” is the URL encoding for “space”. URLs can’t have spaces (or most “special” characters) in them, so if you try to create one with a space in it, that’s how it is represented.
I don’t know that that is your problem, though. A URL with some %20s in it is still “valid”.
Like, suppose I wanted to look for a review of a restaurant (as in this case). I type the name of the restaurant and the city and the state abbreviation. I would expect to get google returns with links to pages that contain reviews of the restaurant. Instead, I got the ‘can’t open’ page. It also happens somewhat frequently when I type in a given name and a surname.
That’s what you think. Sounds like you’re requesting a page with that address, not using Google or something. Did you recently reconfigure the browser (or let it reconfigure itself) to not process entries in the address bar as searches? Are your default search engines configured correctly? Is there a separate box for searches, beside the address bar, that wasn’t there, say, last week?
Since the search query is allowed to have spaces, but URLs are not, the spaces are encoded as “%20”, which is where those come from.
If whatever app is trying to do the search is not constructing that URL as expected, then there will be problems. From the error message, it doesn’t seem to be constructing something that safari recognizes even as a URL.
There is no separate box for searches. There used to be one many years ago, but it went away with a newer version of Safari. The version I’m using (15.5) looks similar to this, with only one box:
Normally, you type what you’re looking for there and you get google results. But sometimes it interprets the search as a URL.
It’s supposed that if I want to make a search in Safari I can put the question in the address bar. What is strange is that sometimes Safari deals the question as an address. For instance, I put: “translate french to english” and Safari says Safari can’t find the server. Safari can’t open the page “translate%20to%20%20english” because Safari can’t find the server “translate franch to english”
It’s a random error that can happen with any link at any time, but it will work 90% of the time. However, once it occurs, then it will continue giving the same issue for some time unless you restart Safari (which is less than ideal as I often find myself logged out of several sessions).
It does indeed seem random. I repeated the search that prompted this thread, and this time I was given search results.
Speculation: Maybe safari depends on an external service to determine whether text in the box is supposed to be a URL or a search, and sometimes that service drops requests and safari defaults to trying to interpret as a URL.
What happens if you disconnect from the network entirely?