My main point was that Beta search needs some character escaping!
As @frank said it looks like CH and or the company owners themselves are resolving these “literal HTML escapes” over time. Most companies affected have been renamed and / or dissolved / ceased. I would imagine most - if not all - were unintended but they were registered with the odd character sequences #.
Since CH now has automated filing I feel there’s only greater potential for this sort of thing. There will be, at least until there is some further validation / restriction on input / change to interface design to guide people towards legitimate responses. (If there is and you know of it - please correct me. I’m also not mentioning the vast legacy data set since that’s an issue for us users.) For an example see this previous post about addresses:
(Not to be down on humans - even now people can still compete with machines in the field of error).
