Latest MyDoom Variant Gives Google Problems

Devil's BSD writes "It seems like the latest MyDoom worm variant has caused a bit of an Internet storm. Google, at this time (12:28 EDT), is returning 503 errors on all queries submitted from certain locations. The MyDoom variant searches the user's address book for email domains (i.e. @yahoo.com) and searches various engines (such as Google) for email addresses in that domain."

Comments

Google is doing fine for regular searches...

[stienman]

Perhaps I'm simply 'located' better, but I can do regular google searches just fine.

But when I ask for "email slashdot.org" it returns a forbidden search page.

So it looks like Google is primarily stopping searches that are typical of this virus, but they may also have automated filtering that stops searches which are too many from IPs and netblocks. This part is probably something they implemented long ago.

But google is going slower for me today, and sometimes it stalls (some of the frontend machines dropping out a bit more frequently than usual?)

-Adam

Re:Ah hah

[gmuslera]

AllTheWeb and Teoma are good alternatives, as far I remember, and do some things in a smarter way than Google. MSN search is supposed to be improved in a beta URL (there was an history here about it some weeks ago)

And you have also metasearchers, that not only search google, but also others. If you want almost the opposite of google in simplicity, you can try Kartoo, where you can have graphs with aggrupations on search results, flash animations and things like that.

Last, but not least, there are a search engine that you can use to find search engines very close to you. If its good enough, probably there is a Slashdot article on it, so slashdot search is a good first step if all the other search engines you know are down but you still can access slashdot.