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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."
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.
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.
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.
Or like we normal people like to say it, it is an invalid domain name.
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!
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).
Test your net with Netalyzr
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.
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... ;-)
I thought it was a contraction of "Go ogle" as a nod to the amount of porn viewed on the internet each day.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
>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
...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 /.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
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.