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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."
Imagine just how much money could Google make if they sold just a small ad on their home page on a 24-hour basis occasionally, maybe even limited to modifying the Google logo in an agreed upon way linked to a page on the sponsoring site. http://www.google.com has to be the most hit page on the planet right now, so such an ad would have awesome power and be able to command top dollar.
Google's clearly taking the high road by making their home page an ad-page zone. I wonder how long that's going to last after the IPO and by definition, profit-hungry interests (such as your 401k plan) get control of the company.
The server in question, by domain name at least, seems to indicate that Google's USA homepage was directing viewers on a path that led to a server in Australia. Just wondering... did any of the trans-oceanic network links show any visible spikes in traffic as a result of this event?
I hope /. doesn't lose its rep as the premiere internet stampede as people start referring to the "Google effect".
/.) gives can be, as they say, as much a blessing as a curse.
Much as I enjoy perusing information (and I do follow the links), this does raise a good question. Obviously, it's generally a good thing for a website to get traffic (usually, that's why the website's there), but are there moral implications for overloading a perfectly innocent site (fortunately, this site seems academic, so we aren't hurting business, per se)? Should we have a guilty conscience for bring down servers as wantonly as we do? I think not, as the Internet is open and free and who's going to stop us, but it's an interesting point they raise.
Reminds me of when I served at a restaurant and managers would complain when business was slow, but they'd get equally upset if a couple of buses pulled in and we were slammed with 100+ customers all at once. With so many customers, it was tough for us to give them good service, much less take good care of the customers we already had. I guess the exposure Google (and
I'm a little surprised that this has never happened before, as they often have featured logos. I guess those fractals must have just looked too alluring, and people had to see them. Then again, i'm quite surprised that so many people click on the featured graphic, perhaps people who aren't familiar with Julia, and were interested in what the graphic meant?
Google clearly has an international network of highly powered servers that have the ability to send out content via HTTP. Maybe Google could open up a side business for those who need a lot of web capacity fast for a short duration, for those who want to keep their websites up despite a major media mention that will quickly subside.
I run a fractal-related site, and just the leftovers from people clicking through to sites that had links to my site was enough to give me 10x the traffic. I had calls from my host and a few other problems, so I took the web sites down for a few hours while trying to help some other folks figure out what was going on.
I've been slashdotted four times or so before, so I know what it's like. The server handled it just fine, it was the connection that was the trouble.
I'm glad that the initial onslaught is over, but I'm still seeing elevated traffic levels, and probably will for a few days. This is normal for any kind of slashdotting.
People are never as simple as their stereotypes. This applies equally to Christians, Muslims, and Emacs-lovers.
At 8:00 a.m. EST, my Mom IM'd me at school to tell me that the Internet as slow at home. At 9:00, my friend who uses my wiki told me that he had been letting it load for about an hour and it wasn't loading. The Xbox-Linux project's wiki also is hosted on my server, and it was inaccessible.
All these web sites are hosted on my little Linux box in my basement, on my parents' cable-modem with 40 KB/s up to the Internet. What happened to me was that the Google logo, linking to the image search for "julia fractals", had my friend Jonathan's site as the top hit. (The exact hit was this page.)
The page was all-but inaccessible, as was my server. I eventually SSH'd in, copied the files to my JHU web hosting space, and set up an Apache redirect to serve the files from there. JHU (my university) has a pretty big pipe, I've learned over the years I've been here. :-).
I mentioned this in a blog entry I made on the topic. It seems that now the search finds some other first hit, the .edu.au site mentioned in the story. Perhaps that's because my server was "Cthuugled" (eaten alive by Google, that is), and no one could reach the first link for so many hours.
|/usr/games/fortune
We have a bit of diliema with Google. On one hand, we get high Google rankings for search terms relevant to products we carry. On the other hand, Google does a complete index of our 4,000+ page site every week, and it takes several days.
We're on a wireless Internet connection due to severe lack of affordable Internet out here in the country, and they want to limit us to 30GB per month. I hate to complain to Google because we do get a lot of new customers from Google searches.
Don't forget the superbowl effect... this commercial took down a site far faster than the wettest of slashdot's hypertext induced dreams. I hit the URL seconds after it showed up during the superbowl anti-tobacco ad. Thirty seconds later, it was reduced to a molten ruin that hasn't been seen since slashdot reported Linus had birthed Daryl McBride's love child. It was epic. So don't give me your slashdot effect or google effect. I bring you he SuperBowl effect.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Sorry, but you're wrong. There's two major problems with what everyone has stated up to this point (include you). For starters, the web uses a protocol that's inherently master/slave based. Because of this, anyone who hosts a website has an inherent ability to offer traffic policing to customers to prevent costing exhorbants amount of money. Offering/not-offering this feature is a part of the free market system upon which capitalism is likely to gain customers. Even those companies who don't offer such a feature might begin offering a p2p solution to http (a mix of http and bittorrent, possibly). The second point is that you, yourself, use an isp of some kind. When you can't access a web site because of of a /.ing or a "google-ing", you're not getting everything out of the internet. Not only that, but the 20 or 40 requests an ISP gets to get a website is 20-40x more bandwidth than if the isp cached requests. So, in effect, there's an obvious market for isps who provide caching, not only because of the direct bandwidth savings for themselves but also through the marketing about being able to see /.ed sites (though I'm sure marketers can create a better buzz phrase). There's also traffic shaping/policing to encourage the use of their squid or other web proxy.
So, in effect, there is an economic solution to the problem at hand. There's also the fault of the people who put up web pages that get /.ed, as they bitch and moan instead of trying to find a technological solution to the problem.
A web server can be made into a p2p distribution system to handle the load instead of crapping out when it runs out of connections. And ISPs can benefit by marketing their caching technology (fact is, HD space + CPU power are still growing massively faster than bandwidth rates, so caching conceivably is to be the fastest for some time to come).
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