Google on again off again?

What's happening to the big G?

[mipapage]

Am I the only one whose having trouble seraching Google lately? Last night for a while and this morning I've had to go elsewhere to do my searching because it appears that they are offline...

[trillianjedi]

I noticed that last night (was getting a 404 for google).

It also seems to me, today, that they've rolled back to the index from just before this last update....

TJ

[Napoleon]

Yes, same here.

I couldn't believe it... I came to WebmasterWorld expecting a deluge of messages, but nothing (until now). There must be something wrong: every other site fine, but not Google.

[mil2k]

Oh god! So it was google. I thought it was my ISP. It's only now when i see these messages that i realize that t was google. I also could not search google and had to use Yahoo. :(

[killroy]

Hmm works fine here from europe.

SN

[swampy webber]

I've seen the same thing on several occasions lately. Went to www2 or www3 and they were ok though?

[mipapage]

Hmm works fine here from europe.

That's where I am - I think that it's a short term event, but if you're in the middle of doing something that requires a search asap, it's a pita!

And it's happened to me at least twice in the last day or two - was it always like this? (and I just didn't notice)

---

Another reason to use Opera - when 'the goog' is down, use another from their 'search toolbar'...

[SuzyUK]

I haven't been able to search on .co.uk since about Saturday..
.com ok though

I kept looking here too, ususally the first place to find out about 'G' ;)

Suzy

[Josefu]

...I've been working at home all day, and it's been working fine here - Paris. And god knows there isn't a worse ISP than mine in existence : )

[webwoman]

No trouble using Google from here. (los angeles)

[Macro]

Not the first time it's happened. There was a post a couple of weeks ago about the same problems. I spent hours changing modems etc thinking my connection had gone funny on me.. till I discovered that Google was down!

[kyr01]

No problem from Italy right now.

[GoogleGuy]

Huh, I haven't heard any reports of problems. People who have had intermittent problems connecting: any common ISP being used? Do you have a static or dynamic IP? Any proxies that you know of? Was it prolonged or would a reload fix it? Are you using straight DNS, or have you hardcoded IP addresses for Google in your resolv.conf or hosts file? Gimme some details. :)

I remember one time users in Europe were seeing garbled images on Google because a UK ISP had a buggy caching server. It took us a while to figure it out because we couldn't recreate it. Anyway, feel free to post more info and I'll be happy to ask around. Thanks!

[mil2k]

any common ISP being used?

I am from India ..so no chance of common ISP with others.

Do you have a static or dynamic IP?

Static IP.

Any proxies that you know of?

no.

Was it prolonged or would a reload fix it?

Sometimes a little prolonged and sometimes relaod would fix it. Also to note that my home page was set to google.com and i get redirected to google.co.in . So sometimes got hung between getting redirected from .com to .co.in . When I used to load Yahoo it used to load fine. It's as mentioned an on and off issue.

Are you using straight DNS, or have you hardcoded IP addresses for Google in your resolv.conf or hosts file?

I had modified my hosts file to see the latest PR on Google toolbar.

Hope you got some answers :)

[Tropical Island]

I just checked our AdWords numbers and the impression numbers are quite high. This is normal after a long weekend in the US however it also shows that this is a very intermitent problem and that most searchers are reaching Google and her (his?) partners.

[SuzyUK]

>>any common ISP being used?
B.Telecom :(

>>Do you have a static or dynamic IP?
Dynamic.

>>Any proxies that you know of?
no?

>>Was it prolonged or would a reload fix it?

Reload wouldn't fix it
Home page is set to google.co.uk
sometimes wouldn't even load googles page
sometimes it would let you seach but then "hang"
Reload Never fixed it (although after the first few times I jusy went straight to .com)

>>Are you using straight DNS, or have you hardcoded IP addresses for Google in your resolv.conf or hosts file?

Had an address in the hosts file (can't remember why now, I'd forgotten about it!) It's now removed and seems to be working fine at the minute..

Suzy

[mipapage]

any common ISP being used?

Ya.com

Do you have a static or dynamic IP?

Static

Any proxies that you know of?

Nope

Was it prolonged or would a reload fix it?

A reload wouldn't fix it. I tried for a few minutes, then went to Alltheweb, then found the site in my browser history (last visited - 3 weeks ago).

Are you using straight DNS, or have you hardcoded IP addresses for Google in your resolv.conf or hosts file?

Toolbar to -cw, that's it.

---

This isn't the first time that this has happened, there have been others that I haven't mentioned, nor have I seen here on WebmasterWorld.

This is however the first time I've headed over to another engine to find a result though. The beauty of having Opera open....

[hafgan]

I have noticed this for the past few months.

One thing interesting is that I did site:www.[mysite].com -qekwe9fjwe

This shows about how many pages are currently indexed by google for my site.

I know what my current number is for the month: We'll call this XXXX

But when I immediately did the site:www.[mysite].com -eoihfwe0fh

after getting 404's (and when Google came back up) the number of pages usually is changed. We'll call this YYYY

So then when I do a search again and get a 404 when Google comes back the number of pages is back to XXXX. I have noticed that this usually happens for about 3 days in a row or so. It gets really annoying.

But after 3 days of flopping back and forth it finally stops and there are now YYYY pages in google for the rest of the month. This seems to repeat whenever they are doing the monthly update.

I have seen speculation that Google is beginning to use a rolling update. I think that this might be a related phenomenon to this.

[Namaste]

Hmmm...I thought it was a virus on Google's server, or something: I'm facing the following very strange problems:
1. 404
2. Very slow
3. On off, on off
4. On Aug 28th, deep new pages in index. These disappear on Aug 29th. Never return.

I'm using a different ISP at home and diff. in the office.

[GoogleGuy]

Weird. I'll ask around and see if user support has gotten any complaints. Namaste--that reminds me. Y'all might want to do a check for scumware with Spybot or something. There are some pretty malicious bugs out there. I wouldn't be surprised to see some scumware that was trying to hijack visits to Google.

[johnnydequino]

Googleguy - It also effected the google datacenters over the weekend as I saw 404 errors over there.

I also got a 404 error on live google sometime between 6-8 eastern time last night.

I bet ya anything it has something to do with the blaster worm.

jd

[mipapage]

Y'all might want to do a check for scumware with Spybot or something.

Yeah, you mentioned this last time, I'm clean, as far as a couple of programs can tell...

[markus007]

my toolbar is hardcoded to ex, and its showing graybar on all sites every 10 min or so.. other then that nothing out of the usual.. Vancouver canada...

[Liane]

It also effected the google datacenters over the weekend as I saw 404 errors over there.

Yep. I saw several error pages at Google (Virgin Islands) & very slow downloads. I figured the slow download times were due to my ISP (horrible service and I supposedly have high speed ADSL).

I too left google and went to alltheweb. First time in a long time I've dumped Google for any other search engine!

[GoogleGuy]

Huh. I'll ask around. My first pass of asking people didn't uncover any 404 reports, so I'll ask a different set of folks. :)

[mipapage]

Mark.

Happening right now.

Lasted < 1min

[SuzyUK]

Happening to me here again too just now.. :(

[DerekH]

OK with google.com but I can't load google.co.uk

This isn't looking good!
DerekH

[GoogleGuy]

Hey, I talked to someone who tracks down these types of issues. Here's what would be the most helpful:
- If you see a 404, we'd love a screenshot showing the URL
- If you see other glitches, you can send us a traceroute from when it happens, with a time/date stamp. If you don't know what a traceroute is, you might not be able to help, but just to explain: it's a diagram of the path that a packet takes to Google. From looking at a traceroute, we can often debug whether some network link along the way is dropping packets for some reason.

If you see some problem and are able to capture any data, send it on to us (I would send it to webmaster [at] google.com with the subject line "Google Networking Traceroute" or something like that) and it will wend its way to an engineer who can examine it.

I haven't run across any reports of problems like this from asking around here, but in case someone is hitting a network issue, more info like the stuff above would help us figure out where it's coming from (Google, ISP, whatever..). Thanks for anyone that cares to send us this info if they see network weirdness!

[turk182]

Hello Googleguy,

I've just encountered the error and I've sent a report to [e-mail], with a screenshot, date and time, and a traceroute.

This 404 is intermittently appearing from some time ago.

Hope this helps.