Society's dependence on Google was made abundantly clear with the fuss over the recent Google outage.
That outage occurred Thursday, May 14. As of this morning, there are still cybergrumblings about Google searches and services like AdSense. Here are some recent Tweet rants about Google:
#google and #gmail are down right now, been clunky all day--- 11 minutes ago from Tweetdeck
Google is down? ---about 2 hours ago from Tweetie
This is the second time this week that Google Docs has been down for me. I'm beginning to doubt their server reliability. Back up your Docs! --- about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck
In fact, in the Test Center we have noticed sporadic packet loss when pinging google.com. We were finding earlier this week as much as 75 percent packet loss in some instances. We sought a response from a contact at Google about any possible lingering issues related to the outage. We were told that there were no known issues at the time, but if we gave specific information Google would be happy to look into it. We mentioned the packet loss but haven't received another response.
Has Google just gotten too big? It's plausible, especially when analysts cite as much as 5 percent of Intenet traffic was stopped dead during Google's outage.
Google keeps expanding its service offerings, so there are users doing a lot more on Google's networks than just Googling. Users are amassing huge amounts of data. Also, consider all of the smartphones and mobile devices now utilizing Google. That's a lot of traffic Google is handling. Anyone in networking knows that network bandwidth and the infrastructure that supports it is not limitless. The larger that infrastructure gets, the more users and end points it has to support, and the harder it may be to bring back from outages, even with the most carefully laid out disaster recovery plan.
Microsoft is an opportune position to get a share of the search engine pie with the release of Kumo. If Microsoft can pull off a decent search engine that exceeds the pitiful Live Search offering, the timing in the wake of Google's recent outage could attract users seeking a Google alternative.
