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."

Comments

1e400.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

"1e400.net, a nod to the company's famously misspelled name"

Could someone explain that one cause I really don't get it or see the nod.

Re:1e400.net?

[eihab]

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

Re:1e400.net?

[sopssa]

It's right in the article..

But on closer inspection, the domain is obviously Google's, chosen with a mathematician's wink at the search giant's famously misspelled name. This mystery domain is 1e100.net. "1e100" would be scientific notation for 10 100, a one followed by 100 zeros, also known as a googol.

Besides, google-analytics.com is way too easy for people to remember to block. Now change it to 1e100.net and they probably get a lot more data.

Re:1e400.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some thoughts about the domain name itself. Google probably wanted to use 10e100, since that character string means 10 to the 100 power - in other words, a googol. Not sure why they settled for 1e100, because that only comes out to a measly 1.

You're wrong. 1e100 is 1 * 10^100

"e" is not the same as "^"

Re:1e400.net?

[Jimmy_B]

XeY means X*10^Y, not X^Y.

Re:1e400.net?

[Bromskloss]

1e100 is the same as 1^100, which is a Googol, or if you're a google founder, spelled "Google"

I hope that was a typo.

• 1e100 = 1E100 = 10^100 = a googol
• 1^100 = 1

Re:1e400.net?

[vlm]

Could someone explain that one cause I really don't get it or see the nod.

Someone screwed up because it should have been 4e100.net, aka "four googol" aka "for google"

Re:1e400.net?

[gad_zuki!]

>Could someone explain that one cause I really don't get it or see the nod.

After a long mescaline trip Eric Schmidt and Larry Page decided the company should be called LEE00 (pronounced lee-ooooo) and the l33t-speak domain 1e400.net was born.

After poor reception from investors and users alike a memo was written up asking all employees to suggest a new domain name. A young intern, who later committed suicide in a bizarre self decapitation with a chainsaw, suggested that 1 to the 400th power was actually a gogool. Schmidt and Page were impressed and after accepting how less fun it is to say gogool than "leeee-oooooo" decided to change the name. Because its difficult to trademark a real word, they just went with "google." 1e400.net is a nod to the good old leeee-ooooo days.

*actually its 1 to 100th power

Re:1e400.net?

[Pharmboy]

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.

Re:1e400.net?

[Chapter80]

A young intern, who later committed suicide in a bizarre self decapitation with a chainsaw, suggested that 1 to the 400th power was actually a gogool.

*actually its 1 to 100th power

Of course, 1 to the 100th power is the same as 1 to the 400th power, is the same as 1.
You mean TEN to the 100th power.

So that would be...

[jra]

a Quoogle?

Re:So that would be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bing!

1e400 or?

[tehniobium]

TFA says 1e100 as in...a gogol.

Re:1e400 or?

[wisnoskij]

1e1 = 1*10^1 = 10
1e10 = 1*10^10 = 10000000000
1e100 = 1*10^100 = a Googol = 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000

Accuracy?

[6031769]

Presumably that should be 1e100.net? And presumably it isn't actually "rerouting" anything. Hmmm.

Re:Accuracy?

[Xest]

This is what happens when people read The Register.

I don't even know why Slashdot links there anymore, it's become such a stupid site, it really is worse than Fox News nowadays.

The issue is that The Register really isn't a news site anymore, it's a pressure group passing itself off as a news site. You'll note many of Andrew Orlowski's articles there for example are full of outright lies, often there is no opportunity to comment on his stories, but when there is they are heavily moderated such that any disagreeing viewpoint is not accepted through. Even if they are, Andrew himself generally deletes them shortly afterwards. He claims it's because he likes correspondence direct to his e-mail, but obviously that misses the point of a comments section which is that it enables discussion with peers on the topic. As seen by his constant congratulations to himself in his articles- things like "I was the only one anyone in the audience applauded", "I was first to unveil the news on this" it's pretty clear what his real problem is, he's an attention seeker, and worse an insecure one, who can't take criticism even when he bluntly knows he's not being honest.

But it's not just Andrew Orlowski, Google is one of The Registers targets of hate along with Wikipedia and some others, as such you cannot treat anything coming from there with any real seriousness. They constantly attack Jimmy Wales for example, and whilst he's far from perfect, let's face it, he's contributed far more to the web with the creation of Wikipedia than anyone at The Register ever has or likely ever will.

It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so hypocritical, they for example launch attacks on climatologists with the arguments of them not being open enough, not being willing to accept criticism, and then in the very same articles they go and block comments either altogether or from anyone dissenting from their viewpoint, anyone pointing out errors in their analysis and so forth. Point out enough errors in their articles, even if you keep yourself reasonable about it, even if you backup your point with perfectly legitimate sources and so forth and eventually your account will just break and you'll get a "Sorry, there was a problem logging in, please contact the webmaster" - any attempt to get your account "fixed" is simply ignored, it's quite clear what their game is. But worse, they sometimes even give the impression they allow dissent with things like "Andrew's mailbag", they will post dissenting comments here, but they'll be very carefully selected, and swamped with counter-comments attacking back, with no right to reply again.

Really, this Google domain is no big deal- it is after all no different to the likes of Akamai domains and so forth which spuriously appear but which no one questions in the same. It's really just a case of The Register making a story where there isn't one, trying to make Google look evil when there's really no big deal. The result is though we get people like have posted here on Slashdot in response to this article, who fall for The Register's agenda, shit bricks and start blocking said hosts when there's really no need unless you're so paranoid that you probably shouldn't be on the internet anyway.

The Register is as agenda based as Fox News and really does not deserve the slightest bit of attention, it's best to just leave it to rot as an "also ran" in the internet's list of IT news sites.

Re:Accuracy?

[Xest]

Well you're right, there's no such thing as truly unbiased news.

But certainly there are extremely biased sources, and it's certainly the case that Fox is one of those sources.

The likes of the BBC are generally much more unbiased, because they exist without needing to answer to shareholders and in fact, have a legal duty in many cases to avoid bias. Whilst you do get cases of individual bias with the BBC, they are just that, and multiple reporters with multiple views will post on the same topics, meaning the likely hood of some inherent bias is much lower than in places like Fox, where people are employed specifically with the goal of a pre-defined agenda.

So yeah, it's hard to find an entirely objective source, but suggesting the likes of the BBC for example are on par with Fox and The Register in terms of bias and zealotry of their agenda is really quite ignorant. The BBC for example does not censor comments for starters based on anything other than a set of objective rules which are clearly laid out and adhered to. They have a proper process for ensuring that anyone who believes their moderation was unfair can appeal.

Re:Accuracy?

[Xest]

Oh I understand what The Register was originally, what it was intended to be (I'm British, we invented that type of humour thanks), and what it kept true to for a long while, but in recent years, perhaps the last 3 or 4 it's strayed much further than that, and been hijacked to push certain agendas. It is not merely a case of hating everybody, I understand they have a very sarcastic negative slant, but you'll notice reoccuring themes that gone well beyond hating everybody. Examples range from climate change, to persistent character assasination of people like Jimmy Wales, to pro-RIAA agenda, to a heavily anti-Google agenda, to often outright false/incorrect opinion pieces on the British military related matters.

What's notable is for some of these repeated themse (pro-RIAA agenda, Climate change) you'll find a strong correlation with prevention of comment posting, or manipulation of comment posting. There is a clear difference between posting news articles with a sarcastic tone, and persistently pursuing certain targets with zeal, and with a clear attempt to manipulate published public opinion of visitors to the site.

Re:Accuracy?

[Xest]

You do realise that there is a legal separation between the government and the BBC right?

The BBC exists by royal mandate, it is entirely separate from government and the government has no influence over it. This is exactly what makes the BBC one of the least bias news sources out there, because any bias can only exist at an individual level, and even then is accountable to the BBC Trust which oversees it. It also has a mandate to transparently handle complaints- the same can't be said of commercial channels like Sky news for example, who may choose to just ignore your complaint and broadcast whatever they wish within the bounds of the law.

Interestingly, this is also why the BBC has historically been able to get reporters where many other Western news channels have struggled, for example Alan Johnston in Gaza before his kidnap and eventual release. The BBC's objectivity is recognised world wide, there are a few exceptions, for example, the current Iranian leadership, but the Taliban for example have also been willing to give interviews where others have struggled.

The BBC's somewhat unique situation is actually good for a lot of televised British news in general because it forces other media outlets to raise the bar somewhat also- Channel 4 News, ITV News for example are of very high quality in comparison to the likes of Fox, and even many Newspapers such as The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and so forth.

Why with all the mystery?

[Dachannien]

Why not just call it 1e400.google.com? Screwy domain names with numbers in them make me think of ads, spam, or malware. I'd be a lot more likely to allow javascript/cookies and not put the site in Adblock or the hosts file if it was clearly a Google domain.

The googol network?

[srussia]

From TFA:As pointed out by Sebastian Stadil, founder of the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group, 1e100.net translates to "Google Network".

Tha would be the googol network. Why not: -o-o-o-.net? (That would be a goggle with an extra "o".)

Re:The googol network?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or like we normal people like to say it, it is an invalid domain name.

Re:The googol network?

[srussia]

-o-o-o-.net is neither RFC1123- nor RFC952-compliant.

With longer straps perhaps?

l-o-o-o-l.net

Re:Blocked in my hosts file.

[FlyingBishop]

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.

Re:wtf?

[Spad]

It's supposed to be 1e100.net, i.e. 1x10^100 or a Googol.

Lazy (or penny pinching?) Slashdot geeks

[ArsenneLupin]

Such an egregious spelling mistake, and nobody yet has snatched up the name and directed it to goatse.fr? Come on guys, you can do better than that!

Its not a "site" per se...

[nweaver]

Really, what google has done is change their reverse information for a LOT of their stuff to point to 1e100.net rather than google, since Google these days is so much more than google: you have youtube, blogger, analytics, doubleclick, and a host of others.

The 1e100.net name is nice because it allows admins etc to go "this is GOOGLE" rather than "this is X" (which got assimilated by google).

Re:Its not a "site" per se...

[TooMuchToDo]

+1; Sane and Rational. Reverse DNS domain for administration purposes. Move along folks.

In other news...

[srussia]

W-U03B1.net ranks in the top 1e100 domains, according to Alexa.

Re:Blocked in my hosts file.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's deceptive, which of course makes it look underhanded, even if it may not be. When I saw it appearing in my firewall logs, I blocked it immediately.

They could have easily used spanner.google.com, or loadshift.google.com, or balancer.google.com, or something else that isn't so suspicious.

Not misspelled

[joeyblades]

Googol is the name of a number, Google is the name of a company. How could anyone claim that the company misspelled their own name?

Re:Not misspelled

[sopssa]

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]."

Re:Slashdot helps

[ajs]

You would be surprised how little impact that has these days. Slashdot continues to be popular with its core demographic, but that Internet has grown by orders of magnitude since being Slashdotted meant something. Now, if this had been posted to a World of Warcraft forum... ;-)

Re:what a load of crap

[proslack]

I thought it was a contraction of "Go ogle" as a nod to the amount of porn viewed on the internet each day.

Re:Blocked in my hosts file.

[Mister Whirly]

Well, you really showed them. Next time they roll out a new domain name, I am sure they will check with you first to see if you approve.

And the domain name is actually the numerical equivalent of a googol, which makes it clever, not underhanded. Just because you didn't get it doesn't make it sneaky.

Re:Slashdot helps

[jonadab]

> Now, if this had been posted to a WoW forum... ;-)

Meh. Really the modern equivalent of the old slashdot effect these days is when the Google doodle returns your site as the first result. Hopefully your hosting provider doesn't bill by the megabyte...

Re:And... so what?

[Xest]

Rather than repeat myself, see my post here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1541436&cid=31060452

Effectively it's a non-story, hyped up into a story by typical The Register anti-Google trolling.

I don't like a lot of things Google does, particularly Schmidt's "done nothing wrong, got nothing to hide" style comments, but really, non-stories like this are just utterly stupid and as they're part of The Register's agenda based bullshit wagon, don't even deserve to be entertained.

Re:Slashdot helps

[aywwts4]

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/ )

79 comment about the scientific notation of google

[terraformer]

...and 1 comment asking what the article means to all of us. Not a single comment on why are they redirecting things through this domain.

Yup, this is /.

Nothing too new...

[Qubit]

I had to do some network analysis last year to try to track down the source of massive overload on our firewall. The domain 1e100.net came up a few times, and it took me a second before I figured out the clever naming choice.

I guess I never thought that the name was a big enough deal to be worthy of a whole Slashdot story.

Don't believe it.

[whoever57]

At home, I run a squid proxy and all port 80 requests must go through it.

I checked the logs, which go back 8 weeks, and there is not a single instance of 1e100.net in them. It might be on an alternate port, but my personal browser is explicitly set to use the proxy.

Clearly Alexa sees the requests to this domain, but, Alexa only has information from people who have installed the Alexa toolbar, so perhaps the 1e100.net domain is somehow only used by people who have the Alexa toolbar?

Re:Don't believe it.

[aywwts4]

6 months of 100 user's squid logs to grep, 1e100 turns up nothing other than the image on this story's link, it can't be http.

We use Google for everything including our site wide mail, advertising, website Analytics, and even our DNS and Chrome is the default browser at a lot of locations, then we have the android handsets... (The owners have daughters working at Google, but hey, we aren't a Microsoft shop, and their daughters already sold them on the value of Linux for everything else, so my life is easy.)

Google briefly took over Wikipedia that way

[Animats]

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.

The story from Google...

[chrisd]

Hey, the fellows in netops asked me to clarify for you folks here's the story:

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!