Trivium

Tue Aug 20 05:35:37 UTC 2013

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 <mpetach at netflight.com>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 <mysidia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> 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
> >
> >
>