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Is this still meaningful? I noticed people referring to other hostnames which are located at different datacenters, but I haven't looked at those in detail.
Are www2/3 still indicative of what is to come on www?
www2 and www3 point to one specific datacentre for a few days or weeks at a time.
To get the full picture search directly at each individual datacentre in turn: www-fi.google.com, -in, -va, -ab, -dc, -cw, -ex, -zu, -lm, -mc, -kr, and -sj.
For each datacentre -xx there is also a matching -xx2 too.
Several datacentres are offline at the moment.
www picks from a random datacentre for each query
One interesting thing that I noticed back when the -in changes were very different from www is that while www does just redirect queries to the different datacenters they seem to have some load balance algorithm that will give a particular user the same datacenter over and over for that user's session.
In otherwords, I would go and do a www search and see the -in results and then hit refresh over and over and always see the -in results. Then I would wait a while, come back and next time I would get the -cw results and if I refreshed over and over I would just get the -cw results again.
I think this fact is what causes some people to freak out and say stuff like "-in results have moved to all datacenters"
Yes. I noticed the exact same thing in searches I did yesterday.
