Google was down sporadicly on 6/14/08 early in the morning.
Around 0107 est Google was in fact off line! In this post I will explore answers to why Google was down. It will range from very logical to full blown tin-foil hat theories. If a screen shot can mean anything any more.
Sorry, for the quality of the image. Its just late… Worked hard today, got many things accomplished….
What does this really mean? Well, the content that was generated is the following code from Google.com
at the time of the error.
”
———-CODE SNIPPET STARTS HERE——————————————–
————————————–Code Snippet Ends Here———————————————
”
Very interesting!
Well, once Google was up and going again I used the search service. As it turns out Google .. 100fweg part of the snippet is very interesting. If you do a Google query on: ?foiffs=in100fweg. You can expect to see a whole bunch of different comments on it. One, thing that I took note from was the fact this is used a lot when your domain name is about to expire. Technically speaking a Cyber-squatter lost out big on this one.. Granted they should all really find a hobby, because, it is annoying. So, what do cyber squatters normally attempt to accomplish, well grabbing typo domains. This can also happens if an ad being delivered from an ad server isn’t delivered correctly.
I’ve been back to Google a few times now & it is now 0324 14th of June. So, it is currently still an issue. Although, Google is such a large account & I doubt anyone would be able to take advantage of the situation. I imagine that sort of attack would take a little bit more skill that your average domain squatter would be able to accomplish. I mean buying the domain Google I image wouldn’t fetch a small price tag, thus, someone would really would have had to be setting something like this up for months to be able to get the money(probably illegally).. Launder the money in time so that no reverse transactions are actually made. Be immune to any sort of court hearings that would arise in order to reclaim the domain…. It really just dosn’t get any easier from that point on… And even then the motif for such a crime isn’t really right either. You wouldn’t be able to keep the domain & maybe the only result a person or group could actually hope to have is a defacement. Harvest logins & passwords..
If Google isn’t up for domain renewal, what is it?
Well, one possibility is that Google is actually under some sort of DDOS(Distributed Denial Of Service) attack. I don’t see why not Google has been a target in the past for such attacks along with other large name sites.. Sure, its possible.. I can only see this being the issue if Google is not up for Domain reregistration & I would even image for a company like Google its automated to some degree, or, in the least someone over at Google knows it is coming up.. And was a little late on delivery & will be terminated soon enough I’m sure.
Let’s put on the Tin Foil hats!
Ok….Ok.. Well, Google wasn’t under attack & no threat from squatters. Well, this page is only generated when some sort of content is being generated from a script at times. Google must be testing or tweaking new aspects of the algorithm. Possibly, it is testing being done for Android & want to test it on a production server. Closer?! Maybe.. Well, is it a new service being offered & things just are not going to plan?
The real reason why Google is down on 6/14/08
Since, I rather enjoy the feeling of the 2 grams of foil on the top of my head I think I will delve into they are upgrading the algorithm & integrating Yahoo! ads on the a similar ad server. This is in fact what is triggering the broken pages.. So, I imagine Google today felt pretty good about their offer to Yahoo!. Google in fact demonstrated on a few test server clusters about how the ads will be generated for this new partnership & all appeared to be working smoothly, until it came time for real world production. Google & Yahoo! are now probably rushing to get done this new Ad system configured to one another, so, people with multiple ads on both Yahoo! & Google adsense are not appearing the same page for both keywords. We will unlimitedly have to wait to see how these two search giants decide to display to really see the end result.
Conclusion
Well, thank you for reading all the way down to here.. Seriously, you didn’t have to.. I warned you in the beginning it was going to be logical & go right to the tin-foil hat.. That code is the most logical part of this entire post! If you really would have read it… It would have said www.goolgle.com ….. Not www.Google.com
Have a happy Saturday & hope you are not to mad at these last two post being link bait.. I do hope they have been informative though. Keep up on your domain renewal so that you do not become a victim of cyber squatting. My next blog will be on searching, I will cover the right click ‘view page source’ on firefox & other browsers & that could have helped you avoid this whole, entire mess.(Yeah, its not really link bait so much. but, it will do for now.)