he was right to be stubborn.. that's not SQL injection. he seems to use a test for just if the query parameter contains the substring 'tops' anywhere (case insensitive)
So this works: http://www.triads.co.uk/search.html?query=asdfqwerToPSasdfqwer query=asdfqwerToPSasdfqwer
And this doesn't: http://www.triads.co.uk/search.html?query=asdfqwerT__oPSasdfqwer query=asdfqwerT__oPSasdfqwer
if written in PHP, it would look something like:
db_qry = "SELECT * FROM ";
if ( stristr($_GET["query"],"tops") ) db_qry += "Tops";
if ( stristr($_GET["query"],"jeans") ) db_qry += "Jeans";
stristr is case-insensitive. There is multiple XSS injections from that parameter if it's any consolation, but that particular one doesn't seem to be vulnerable to SQL injecting..
XSS: http://www.triads.co.uk/search.html?query=%22%3E%3Cscript%3Ealert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))%3C/script%3E%3Cx
-maluc