Googlers Do Without

Did you notice that the world stopped spinning for 15 minutes on Saturday afternoon? If you were enjoying the great outdoors you probably didn't, but if you were at your computer, surfing the web, you might have very well stumbled on the global catastrophe.

OK, I admit it. Nobody died and no buildings crumbled, but web surfers throughout the world had to spend a full quarter hour without access to Google or any of its services including news, email and comparison shopping.

I rely on Google's Gmail email service and had to go without email for a few minutes. How dare they force me to pick up the phone, or shudder the thought, have a face-to-face conversation to communicate with people?

The culprit, according to Google spokesman David Krane, was a DNS lookup glitch. DNS, which stands for "Domain Name Server," is the process that translates friendly domain names like Google.com into those almost impossible to remember IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. If anyone had typed in Google's actual IP address (http://216.239.37.99/), they would have reached the site during the outage, according to Krane.

The web, of course, was swirling with speculation as to whether Google had been hacked and, indeed, respected blogger and journalist Om Malik (http://gigaom.com/) reported that he and other web users had been misdirected to another web page when they typed in Google.com. That, Malik posted later, may have been a "result of browsers not being able to resolve to Google.com, and instead (stumbling) upon google.com.net."

Why We Care

What's most interesting about this story is not that Google was down for 15 minutes. That can happen to any website and, indeed has happened to many well-known sites many times over the years.

What's interesting here is that we care. I first heard about it when I got a call from an editor at a radio station who, rightfully, considered it news. The Associated Press reported on the outage and, of course, I'm writing about it here.

The fact is that Google isn't just any website. It's part of the daily routines of tens of millions of people around the world. It's probably an understatement to say that a Google outage is as important a story if a major TV network went black or if the phone company couldn't get calls through for a few minutes.

The fact that Google's 15-minute outage was noticed says wonders about how the world has come to depend on that company which, just a few years ago, was simply a good idea by a couple of Stanford graduate students.

I could go on for pages on what that means, both technologically and philosophically. I think it says something about our sense of priorities. Like cell phones and other technologies we've come to depend on, what was unavailable yesterday is indispensable today.

Of course the reverse is also true. Back in the 70s, I was devastated when my IBM Selectric typewriter was out of order. Today, a typewriter repair shop is about as popular as businesses that services buggy whips. In fact, as I typed the word "Selectric," I noticed that Microsoft Word flagged it as a misspelling. Three decades ago, it was almost a household word that certainly would have been in spell checkers - if there were any at the time.

That fact is not lost on smart people who run companies like Google. The good ones know that they have no God-given right to remain relevant. If they don't keep innovating, their role in the world will be right down there with that of the typewriter, eight-track tape deck and the rest of yesterday's news.

I remember when AltaVista was the best search engine on the web - until it was eclipsed by Yahoo and Google. I also remember when the two leading ways to get online were companies called CompuServe and Prodigy. As these companies have learned, it's not just a question of keeping your business "up," it's also a matter of keeping it up-to-date.

Video Search

Yahoo, by the way, has been busy keeping itself up-to-date. Its new video search service is amazing. What's fun about it is that you can use it to find video clips from yesterday.

Go to Yahoo, clicking on the video link and trying typing in "3 Stooges" or "John Kennedy." I'm not sure if all the people posting those video clips are in compliance with the copyright law, but they - along with Yahoo and other video search services - are sure keeping the web fun and interesting.