Head-scratching software bug

I don't know how this little snippet of code got into a project at work (despite the temptation to look at the file's history):

Search = Search.Replace("Search…", "");

// Perform a search that depends on the Search member being an empty string
// Display the list of things you find

First, I can't fathom why the original developer made the search method dependent on a hard-coded string.

Second, as soon as the first user hit this code after switching her user profile to display Japanese, the search failed.

The fix was crushingly simple:

var localizedSearchPrompt = GetLocalizedString("SearchPrompt");
Search = Search.Replace(localizedSearchPrompt, string.Empty);

(The GetLocalizedString method in this sample is actually a stub for the code that gets the string in the current user's language.)

The moral of the story is: avoid hard-coded strings, just like you've been taught since you started programming.