You're probably using the KitKat WebView. This is a known issue (I think it's outlined in the migration guide) where URLs that can't be resolved against the base URL are dropped on the floor (you won't get any callbacks for them, neither shouldOverrideUrlLoading nor onPageStarted).
Please refer to the link:[developer.android.com/guide/webapps/migrating.html][1]

[1]: http://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/migrating.html

You're probably using the KitKat WebView. This is a known issue (I think it's outlined in the migration guide) where URLs that can't be resolved against the base URL are dropped on the floor (you won't get any callbacks for them, neither shouldOverrideUrlLoading nor onPageStarted).
The problem is that your base URL is a data url, so you're trying to resolve '/q?type=short' against 'data:text/html,...' which doesn't make much sense and so the whole attempt to navigate to the URL gets ignored.
This was different for the pre-KK WebView which used KURL instead of GURL for URL processing. GURL is generally more strict (and more secure) than KURL, which is the cause for some incompatibility between the two WebView versions.