Slashdot Mirror
Google Mystery Domain Reroutes 3% of Net Surfers
An anonymous reader writes "A new Google domain — 1e100.net, a nod to the company's famously misspelled name — is now the net's 44th most visited site. Google says the domain is used to 'identify servers' on its internal network, hinting that reverse DNS plays a role. The domain was registered in September and launched in October, about the same time Google unveiled Spanner, a new addition to its backend infrastructure designed to shift loads automatically among its data centers."
TFA says 1e100 as in...a gogol.
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
Wrong summary. I emailed the editors a minute too late I guess.
The domain is 1e100.net:
Domain Name: 1E100.NET
Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC.
Whois Server: whois.markmonitor.com
Referral URL: http://www.markmonitor.com/
Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Status: serverDeleteProhibited
Status: serverRenewProhibited
Status: serverTransferProhibited
Status: serverUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 13-oct-2009
Creation Date: 25-sep-2009
Expiration Date: 25-sep-2019
If you can't mod them join them.
You realize that it's just infrastructure, right? You might as well block images.google.com for all the good it will do you. It's just a domain name.
It's supposed to be 1e100.net, i.e. 1x10^100 or a Googol.
You're wrong. 1e100 is 1 * 10^100
"e" is not the same as "^"
XeY means X*10^Y, not X^Y.
Domain Name: 1E400.NET
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.enom.com
Referral URL: http://www.enom.com/
Name Server: NS1.NONEXISTE.NET
Name Server: NS2.NONEXISTE.NET
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 08-feb-2010
Creation Date: 08-feb-2010
Expiration Date: 08-feb-2011
It just has a picture of a very nice rainbow, over some island city.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Slashdot really has stayed still while the internet changed and matured around it, other than the absence of some memes and Y2K stories the slashdot of '99 looks much like today. (For better or worse) ...
We are the tech Luddites!
And yes "Slashdotting" is such and incredibly dated and egocentric word dating back to when our population was something to be impressed with, that day has long since passed, the few times we do "slashdot" a real server everyone gets all giddy, and I just don't have the heart to tell them that it was fine when it hit our front-page, but it just hit the front of reddit and digg.
(If you don't recall what it looked like, this is what ten years of progress on a cutting edge geek/tech site looks like http://web.archive.org/web/19991013054427/http://slashdot.org/ )
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
Because they originally did:
"Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name - something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data," Koller writes.
"Sean verbally suggested the word 'googolplex' [a one followed by a googol zeros], and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, 'googol'....Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use.
"Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as "google.com," which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name 'google.com" for himself and [fellow co-founder] Sergey [Brin]."
For a brief period on February 5, "en.wikipedia.org" was directed by DNS to an address at "pw-in-f139.1e100.net". That was quickly corrected, although it may have happened more than once. Apparently somebody at Google sent out some bad DNS records. (Google is now in the DNS business, remember.) They need to be more careful.
1e100.net is a Google-owned domain name used to identify the servers in our network. Following standard industry practice, we make sure each IP address has a corresponding hostname. Starting in October 2009, we started using a single domain name to identify our servers across all Google products, rather than use different product domains such as youtube.com, blogger.com, and google.com. We did this for two reasons: first, to keep things simpler, and second, to proactively improve security by protecting against potential threats such as cross-site scripting attacks. Most typical Internet users will never see 1e100.net, but we picked we picked a Googley name for it just in case (1e100 is scientific notation for 1 googol).
So there you go!
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.