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."

Comments

Should Google try to convert its traffic to money?

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Insult to Injury

[Dukael_Mikakis]

I hope /. doesn't lose its rep as the premiere internet stampede as people start referring to the "Google effect".

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 /.) gives can be, as they say, as much a blessing as a curse.

Surprising

[Aneurysm]

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?

New service: Google CachePlus?

[LostCluster]

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.

My site was "Cthuugled", too

[paulproteus]

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.