During the night of Saturday the 7th of May, the unthinkable appeared to have happened, with users of the web's most popular search engine finding only the dreaded "page not found" error screen.
Some users were surprised to find themselves at the SoGoSearch engine rather than the Google search engine, which may have been even more surprising for them than a page not found screen. After all, not being able to resolve Google is the sort of thing you can happily blame on your ISP, whereas appearing on someone else's search site is the sort of thing that rumours are made of.
Naturally, the disappearance of Google sparked rumours that the search engine giant had been hacked. In truth however, it would seem that the problem was far more mundane than that. The Google domain name server, which tells your PC how to find the Google site, had a couple of problems. Some users ended up on SoGoSearch because they own the www.google.com.net domain.
There are of course lots of other search engines out there. Users are not tied to using one. But with so many millions of queries a day, this just goes to show the reliance that the world would seem to have on Google, and how we panic when it's safe and reliable service is taken away from us, if only for a short while. Here's to hoping it doesn't happen again, at least not for a while.
|
|
Reader Comments: 0
