Can't Slashdot Google

Google continues to impress me.  Not just with their technical skills (although the ability to dynamically serve scalable maps overlaid with your search results is pretty darned impressive).

No, what impresses me is that they can beta such a service, and survive a slashdotting on the first day.  And that they can do so consistently, day in and day out.

Kudos.

 Their betas are where most of us would like our final products to end up...

Posted by Jeff Lewis at
I can no longer fathom the amount of computing resources at their disposal. They cache a good portion of the internet.  Their spiders are everywhere, all the time.  They can handle any amount of traffic.  I'm surprised there is enough power in SV to keep their servers running.

Posted by christopher baus at
But you can Google Slashdot!

Posted by Matt Brubeck at

Google Maps

Google has now launched, at least into their notorious “beta process,” Google Maps. After finding out it doesn’t work with...... [more]

Trackback from Pensieri di un lunatico minore at

"although the ability to dynamically serve scalable maps overlaid with your search results is pretty darned impressive"

It appears to be all DHTML. Joys of modern the WWW. :)

Posted by David Wilson at

The idea that Slashdot would manage to bring down Google is kind of funny. The Google front page gets more traffic in a day than Slashdot probably gets in a week or longer. Google's key competence is knowhow in running literally ten thousands of commodity hardware servers with a minimum of personnel. Akamai provides them with uplinks fatter than you can imagine.

It's not that impressive for a site to survive slashdotting anyway, sites like eBay and Amazon dwarf Slashdot for traffic. Sure, Slashdot regularly brings down pages — but most all of them are hosted on a single web server with some flavour of Ethernet for uplink. That's not hard to saturate.

The Feb 3rd 2004 doodle linked to an Google image search for fractals. The first hit on that query was an image from a page on a University web server. The resulting traffic to that page saturated the bandwidth of a substantial part of the Uni network and they asked Google to remove the page from their index or something like that. I don't remember the details, but the bottom line is that a tsunami of traffic smashed down onto a page three clicks away from the front page of Google.

If one of those Google doodles linked to Slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised to see Slashdot go down.

Posted by Aristotle at

Aristotle,
  Your assumption is that Google's beta services are running on the same server farm as the main search engine. Given the behavior of Blogger, Orkut and GMail this isn't necessarily the case.

  You are right that if they are using the main server farms then Slashdot traffic isn't significant traffic to them.

PS: The page was two clicks away from the Google front page.

Posted by Dare Obasanjo at
Agreed -- Google understands scaling of web architectures pretty well... (at least since Orkut, which didn't so well at the beginning).

Posted by David Ascher at

Google Maps

Google Maps is without doubt very kwel and it's amazing that it survived being slashdotted and OK it's a beta, but you know it's really hard to get excited when you're not even on it ........ [more]

Trackback from Paul Downey at
Aristotle got it right. Slashdot accounts for about 5000 pagereads with a direct link off the home page. An A-list blogger generates more flow these days. Google is handling billions of requests a day and a link from their home page has got to be worth milliosn of hits. Yes, that's impressive, but getting Slashdotted has nothing to do with it.

Posted by Pythagoras at

Dare:

Oops, two clicks indeed.

I admit I hadn't thought about the fact that they may not be running all their services on the same server farm, but I don't believe that applies in the case of Google Maps. Orkut and Blogger were/are separate brands under the Google umbrella, while Maps looks like something much like Local, Froogle, Print etc that is supposed to be part of the main search engine. OTOH I'm not sure where GMail fits into this picture, so…

(And to whoever posted as “Pythagoras”: this isn't a pseudonym, Aristotle is my actual first name. :-) )

Posted by Aristotle at

Google Maps

Google Maps is without doubt very kwel and it's amazing that it survived being slashdotted and OK it's a beta, but you know it's really hard to get excited when you're not even on it .. Update: Joel Webber reveals how it works....... [more]

Trackback from Paul Downey at

Add your comment












Nav Bar