Over the whole weekend, the Google searchbox on my Firefox browser was only working intermittently. Only when it is not there do you realise how much you use it. I was seriously suffering from withdrawal symptoms. I had to switch over to the Yahoo search mode instead for a bit, purely to scan the news headline to see if the mighty Google might have been knocked off the internet by some massive DDOS attack from some cartel demanding to be listed first in any search result. But in fact, there was nothing. OK, so I next tried to reach www.google.com directly on the browser. This timed out. The error did not say Google does not exist, meaning DNS poisoning is not a cause. a timeout error indicates that it is a routing problem. Sure enough, I could not ping Google, I could not telnet to Google port 80 (equivalent to doing what the browser does, but manually), and I could not trace route to Google.

Google did not come back until late in the afternoon, but kept on switching out intermittently. Interestingly, the rest of the internet still carries on delivering Adsense ads on their pages, meaning the Adsense servers must be sitting in the same building as Fort Knox, rather than on top of San Andreas' faultline, like those Blades servers for search results.

I saw another article on news.com today, more or less confirming something was going on over the weekend, even though the folks at Google denied all knowledge of it. 

This culture of secrecy is starting to get a bit like 'you know who'. I am not sure if it is necessary.

By the way, I am just wondering what it will be like five years down the road, when the Google searchbox appears in our mobile phones, our desktop TV boxes, our fridge, our lawn mower etc., and if suddenly it stops working like over the weekend, then who will I be complaining to ? Can't very well ring up Google as I did not pay anything for their services in the first place, well not directly anyway.

Conspiracy theorists will have a field day today, I guess. Maybe Google should have given in to the Justice Department and given them that porn list they were looking for, then my Saturday afternoon would not have been filled with ten doses of Latte and those black and white movies on the telly. 

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