www2 and www3 - same IP ?

[bcc1234]

So what's the difference ?

[agerhart]

www2 and www3 are the servers at Google where you can see the new results during an update.

[bcc1234]

But they have the same IP address.

[pontifex]

That does not mean that these 2 addresses run the same machine...
there are a few techniques to load balance a server farm behind a single IP.
My opinion is, that they either use a forker system by own development or configured their apache as a redirector (internally). so they hide thousands of computers behind a few (houndred :-) IPs...

I dare to post a URL by a case stuy about google from Intel:
[intel.com...]

[bcc1234]

The do use load-balancing and they use their own web servers, it's not apache.

But it's just too weird that they have www, www2 and www3 and only two public IPs for them.

[danny]

I haven't seen different results on www2 and www3 for some time, so maybe they are now the same service.

[Markus]

As far as I can remember, both www2 and www3 point to the 35 IP since early 2002. Before, they both pointed to the 51 IP for a month. But it has been the same IP, the same data center and, hence, the same index for both wwws for quite some time now.

Normally, there is no internal redirection to other indexes. But during the last two updates Google started to redirect searches one or two days before the dance begins. When they do that, the IP the 'cached' link points to differs from the IP www2 and www3 resolve to by DNS. Maybe they'll do it again this month. Check it out.