I agree. I think its over stated. But I do think there was a more direct customer-disadvantage outcome, albiet increadibly brief. I think a bunch of people like me have now got a better sense our always-on backend is 'brittle' even if very very strong, most of the time.
http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1376701087982 suggests it was a disconnection from considerably more than search. I don't believe index analogies jusify some of the scaling/visualization/comparison-to-root-dns things, but I would have been made distinctly uncomfortable in some circumstances by the loss of google backed email, google drive, and their implicit "no local storage required: you're always on" behaviour. An example is when I posted some stuff to the UK from the Post office across from the hotel at IETF, and spend 2 min online searching google mail for the address. Or, given the new "your airline ticket on your phone" model, I might have been trying to checkin at the last 5 minutes onto a flight. Or get into a ball game... Is this "40% of the net offline" ? no. Was it pretty wide reaching? Yes. On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Matthew Petach <[email protected]>wrote: > I'm curious; do people really think that the difference in material > indexed between Google, Yahoo/Bing, and others is really that > big? I don't mean the heuristics and algorithms used to return > the results in a particularly useful order; I mean the sheer raw > set of indexed pages. I don't debate that Google found a > particularly useful page ranking system; but I question the > notion that the loss of Google was akin to the loss of your > root directory. > > Matt > > > > > On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:12 PM, Jimmy Hess <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Randy Bush <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > Without Google, how do you know where anything even *is*? > > > > > > ask that to 20% of the world's population > > > > > > Turning off Google is essentially doing a rm -rf http:// > > www-wide analog to rm -rf / or temporarily loss of the root > directory, > > pending a fsck. > > > > The important stuff is still there, somewhere... it's just becomes a > real > > chore to get to your files without a useful directory provided by the > > indexing system, until you can get your superblock repaired. > > > > Webcrawler, Gopher sites, and Archie search engine become viable options. > > > > > > There's also backup on some stacks of tapes somewhere labelled Bing, > DMOZ, > > Yahoo, and a few other misc. unlabelled stacks, various well-known .COM > > and .EDU domains, which you could probably use to find your materials > if > > you downloaded the old Hosts.txt files; if you look long and hard > enough, > > you can still find the filesystem data you need to relink the directory > > and get at the files you need; it can just be darn inconvenient > sorting > > out all the spam. > > > > > > randy > > > > > > > -- > > -JH > > > > >
