This evening I’m getting slow response or connection timeouts from Google for the past half hour or so (20:30 - 21:00 PDT). Usually this means that the local network is having problems, but other major sites (Yahoo, CNN) are running as quickly as ever, along with various SSH sessions around the world, so it seems to be specific to Google.
So far I get slow or no response from the main search page, Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, Analytics, and Finance.
Pages that do respond are coming back in 10+ seconds, and some pages are loading without graphics or with templates only and no content.
Anyone else seeing these problems? This is the first time I’ve seen Google unusable for more than a minute or two. (Unlike this site, which has been bouncing up and down due to problems at Dreamhost lately).
Here’s a quick snapshot of incoming search engine referrals for the past few weeks. Compare this with another post last year on search engine referral share, recently referenced in a post at Alexa noting the discrepancy between the published search engine traffic reports and anecdotal observations by webmasters.
Is it just me, or are these charts a bit goofy? Does Yahoo really still have 23% of the search market? Is Google at less than half the search market?
I don’t believe it. Any webmaster will tell you that Google represents almost ALL of the search engine traffic. Yahoo is nowhere near 23%. Just read the blogs, here, here, here and here and on countless other blogs.
Already at 82% last October, Google has increased to even more of the incoming search traffic (92%) here, largely at the expense of “Other”. In the fall, it looked like those were mostly miscellaneous Chinese search engines, so perhaps my site is not getting indexed or ranked well there anymore, or Google is picking up market share, or both.
“Knights, I bid you welcome to your new home…Camelot!”
An amazing mashup of Monty Python’s “Knights of the Round Table” song, with singing and dancing by the cast of the original Star Trek.
If this doesn’t leave you rolling around on the floor, it probably means you’re completely baffled and/or younger than 30 or so.
Try naming the episodes for extra credit…
via The Big Picture
I love blueberry season — Safeway has 2.5 pound boxes for 5.99 and even Whole Foods is carrying 2 pound boxes for 9.99. This morning we dug out the recipe for blueberry buckle and mixed up a batch before it got too hot again (yesterday it hit 101 degrees in Palo Alto).
Some fine weekend reading for search engineers, SEOs, and spam network operators:
A 47-page independent report on Google Adwords / Adsense click fraud, filed yesterday as part of a legal dispute between Lane’s Gifts and Google, provides a great overview of the history and current state of click fraud, invalid clicks of all types, and the four-layered filtering process that Google uses to detect them.
Google has built the following four “lines of defense” against invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.
These guys have been shooting scenes for their movie at the house down the street for the past couple of days. I can see the lights from my home office on the second floor, and this evening we walked over to take a look.
Dan Engelhardt started making movies on his iMac as a seventh-grader in Menlo Park. Brad Leong put on a student film festival — which included his own work — when he was a junior at Palo Alto High.
This summer, these two precocious 20-year-olds are home from college to make their first full-length feature film, a coming-of-age movie they hope will be the next “American Graffiti.'’ It’s set in — where else? — Palo Alto.
A few days earlier they were around the corner over at a house on Bryant. Those scenes apparently involved hanging lots of toilet paper on the trees in the yard. They’ve gotten grants from Panavision, Kodak, and Apple, so they’re better equipped than the average videoblogging operation.
I was out for dinner at Fukisushi in Palo Alto this evening, enjoying some excellent spider rolls and giant clam sushi. A few minutes after we were served, a young couple came in, perhaps meeting for a date after work. At first I noticed that the man had the same cell phone (a Nokia 6682) as my wife, as he took it out and set it on the table next to him. Then he took out a Motorola Razr, flipped it open, and set it on the table next to the Nokia. I’m thinking that this is somewhat geeky and he should be paying more attention to his attractive blonde companion, but he looks like an engineering or tech operations kind of guy, and this is Silicon Valley, so maybe he has a work phone for being on call and a personal phone. But then he pulls out yet another phone, flips it open and sets it down next to the other two, creating a sort of mini-console of cell phones on the table next to the sushi plates.
…but other sites are apparently blocked.
There are a fair number of readers here from India, where some ISPs have started blocking many blogs, including all of Typepad, Blogspot, Geocities. So you might have thought this site was also blocked if you came by yesterday, since you would have gotten something like “Connection refused” or a similar error message.
Fortunately / unfortunately, it’s just Dreamhost having some hardware and network problems, which took down many of their clients for several hours yesterday, and is still behaving badly today.
I’ve had two online forum transition experiences in a week now. It’s interesting to observe how quickly an existing user base can be fragmented or even lost altogether.
The Yahoo Finance message boards uproar continues. Now that I’ve tried it more than once during the past few days, I’m still finding it difficult to scan quickly. More importantly to Yahoo, there are signs of mass migration to other message boards by very active participants looking for a new home. Much of the flock may still settle back at Yahoo, but it looks like there’s been a lot of people checking out the alternatives during the past few days.
Dropped by the Yahoo Finance message boards this evening to scan through comments. The Yahoo Message Boards have been around in the same form for nearly as long as Yahoo, and for the past several weeks Yahoo has been testing a new format, which I find hard to read. Fortunately, there was a link to return to the original version, and I think it’s been popular.
Sometime over the weekend, all Yahoo Finance message boards have been upgraded to the new version, with no way to get to the old version.
This post captures the sentiment of many members:
IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM YAHOO!
Hi, I am the Project Manager for the new Yahoo Message Boards. I just wanted to let you all know that we will be adding even more new features to the stunning new boards next week:
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