UK datacenter IP list, anyone?

[dangerman]

It has been such a long time since I last looked at Google data centers, but one of my United Kingdom sites is dancing a merry old jig right now, so I thought I would take a peek at some of the other datacenters.

The current IP being used from where I am is 216.239.59.104

Looked at an online datacenter tool site but these seem to all be US or at least not relating specifically to the UK. There is also a reference to C-blocks, which is new to me.

Anyone have a list of current UK data centers or at least able to point me in the right direction?

thanks

[edited by: tedster at 4:25 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2008]

[tedster]

I just mentioned this in another thread. My sense of this is that the raw data is stored on all datacenters, and that regional searches apply various filters to those raw results - so there's no one data center involved for any given country or region of a country.

[g1smd]

Google uses ~40 Class C IP blocks.

I summise elsewhere that each Class C block is a bank of perhaps 10 000 servers in a room.

There is a pattern to the IP address usage. The IPs always end in .44, .99, .104, .107, .143 and so on. There are about 30 for each block.

There are also several aliases that can be used, and they give different results again.

These include the GFE name, like gfe-eh.google.com where "eh" is one of ~40 two-letter pairs. These letters have a direct association with the Class C block used. There is also "gfe-xx2" for most of them, and "gfe-xx3" for many of them, and "gfe-xx4" for a very few of them.

The alternative designators come in the form eh-in-f99.google.com where the "eh" is the same two-letter pair as before, and the "99" is the last digits in the IP address. So, there are about 30 of those active, for each of the ~40 two-letter pairs.

There's a list of all the blocks, printed about a year ago in this forum. There have been a few changes since then, but 90% of it is still OK.

[glengara]

So what about separate databases, would it not make sense to have a stand-alone "Pages from the UK" DB?

[tedster]

I think it would be a lot more efficient to have one database, but with records tagged in various ways for different filters. Otherwise there would be how many different databases?

[glengara]

Well there appears to be so many G_litches in "Pages from Ireland" I strongly suspect there's a separate database ;-)

We've got:

"Foreign" pages.
Duplicate pages - same Urls.
Home page replacing MIA secondary pages.
"Web search" rankings above PFI ones.
Number of results fluctuate wildly.

In other words enough oddities to cause a stir if they happened in G.com or even G.co.uk.....