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Google Traffic Takes Down Web Site
bazonkers writes "Searchenginelowdown.com reports that it appears that the Google logo yesterday (honoring Gaston Julia) linked to the Google image search results for the words 'julia fractal'. The resulting traffic generated from clicking on that 'featured logo' incapacitated the servers of the top-listed images, hosted at an Australian university. This more than inconvenienced the owners of that site, who had to move pages and ended up displaying this page instead."
Google just proved that they aren't in the content business, just the search business. When Google made a rare and somewhat nonsensical editorial comment in the form of their modified logo, many people clicked the logo to see where it lead, and where it lead to was a Google image search that yeilded interesting results, so people clicked the images in the hope for information about Gaston Julia...
Google should have written their own article explaining why they decided that Gaston Julia was worthy of being honored. Instead, they simply supplied a suggested search query and passed the curious users to sites who weren't expecting the rush... if Google had asked, I'm sure they would have been able to get an academic to write a decent page to satisfy the curious users, but Google seems to have underestimated the power they have...
Page already loading slow, here's the full text
Using Google?
Looking for images of quaternion fractals?
On the 3rd of February 2004, this page (or rather the page that was here) was swamped by requests and the server subsequentially failed. The reason was traced to Google introducing a fractal looking logo (see below), which when clicked, performed an image search for "julia" and "fractal". The two most interesting resulting images on the top row of the list were on this page (or rather the page that was here).
[Image used without permission from Google]
In order to get this server functional again, the pages that were here have been moved somewhere else. It shouldn't be too hard to find them if you really want to, do a Google search for "Quaternion fractal" or if you would like to create your own Quaternion fractals try POVRay.
Please note that this is not a criticism of Google but rather an interesting dimension to the power they wield. They have hundreds (thousands?) of servers worldwide that distribute their traffic load. If even a small percentage of that traffic is directed to a single server.....what chance does it have?
Questions: Should Google ask permission before potentially sending huge traffic loads to a single page/server? Should they regulate traffic to individual sites/pages by changing the order of the search results?
Happy searching!
Google giveth
and Google taketh away
Blessed is Google?
[Roger Bagula]
Sig? What sig?
The key difference here is that when something gets posted to Slashdot, people often have the ability to grab and post mirrors. Like this one, for instance.
(You're welcome.)
The article on Gaston Julia got a LOT of edits in the last two days.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The Google Cache doesn't contain any images. If you look at the cached version of a page, you get the cached HTML supplying the text, and either the images pulled from the server, or missing image icons in their place.
RTFA, he injured his nose in an army operation.
In one operation on a stormy, cold night he had suffered a severe injury and thus lost his nose. After many unsuccessful operations to remedy the situation, he was forced to wear a leather strap around the area where his nose was for the rest of his life.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
The origional site (I think) can be found at:
q ua ternion/
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/fractals/
You mean like this?
Since this came from a google search, there is a pretty simple way to prevent this from happening, without having Google do anything - use your robots.txt to stop google from indexing your site.
Google is opt-in. If you don't want to be indexed, don't be.
Ew... that's spammer talk. Google complies with robots.txt, but that's an opt-out signal. Those with no robots.txt are presumed to want to be listed. A true opt-in system would require an affirmative robots.txt before Google spiders a site... which isn't the reality.
We may be small down here. But we're not *that* small.
Cheers Koz
It was 1e100'd.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Think that's bad? It's number 17 on Blogdex, and rising.
Although those fractal folks got Google-dotted (or whatever you want to call it), Janet Jackson's boob was the most searched event in internet history, beating out Sept. 11th.
No.
There's not alot of connections to Australia but they're reasonably fast. The Southern Cross cable, for example, has three pairs each capable of 160Gbps.
The Uni might have had 1Gbps
"A NASA guy [That was me, but I don't work for NASA directly, but for Speedera who delivers their traffic] says ... Slashdot was a drop in the bucket compared to links from mainstream news web sites".
I said it here. The Slashdot load depends on the size of the objects downloaded of course, but a reasonable generalization is that the traffic from a top 10 portal is about five to ten times higher.
Don't complaint to Google, use robot.txt to restrict the traffic.
No, it's more likely because Julia's birthday was yesterday, so the 24 hours that they featured the special logo for expired on schedule...
There's not alot of connections to Australia but they're reasonably fast. The Southern Cross cable, for example, has three pairs each capable of 160Gbps.
The Uni might have had 1Gbps
I think we have even more than that. It wasn't the link that was the trouble. The poor server is a lowly alpha 500AU (IIRC, my ssh session is tailing the logs, but it seems I can't get bash swapped back in to run a uname -a). Our connections are fine from the department to the outside world and vice-versa.
The trouble is, this is a webserver for an astronomy and supercomputing department. Paul Bourke's page is from his research - graphics and visualisation. He was intending google to index it - it is our most popular set of pages, and is one of the authorative sources on a lot of things to do with graphics. We just weren't expecting google to link to it from their little graphic thingy. We don't want to ban google from indexing the pages, because that renders the research pointless if no-one can use it.
FYI, the server transferred 30GB in the first day of being hit by the google effect. I transferred 30GB in one day from one of the other supercomputing centres in Victoria, but this was just two processes. The poor webserver is struggling under the load of 150 apache instances right now.
As a matter of fact, Paul already used a term for this in his page (check the second one he made after he was /.'d).
;)
He called it 'googleblatted'.
In honor of Douglas Adams (and his infamous Bugblatter Beast of Traal), I propose this become the official term for being blatted by google
FYI google bombing is normally the act of a large group of people linking to a site to make it the number 1 search for a particular phrase.
For example "Weapons of mass destruction", "tallentless hack", "miserable failure"
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
... can be found here.
I especially like the logo for Einstein's birthday (see March 14, 2003).
- shadowmatter
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