Followers, comments and chaos

Google is currently working on itself.


As a result the comments facility is playing up. If you have word verification switched on people cannot comment. Followers are disappearing left, right and centre. And there is general chaos.


Worry not. Google say it will be fixed shortly and all the followers will return.

Trust me, I'm a computer man.

This Blog won't harm your computer!

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and Google have apologised for the inconvenience caused to their users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. They do this to protect users against visiting sites that could harm their computers.

Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, Google's on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. The duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Google

If anyone ever doubted the seriousness of Google, the skill of its developers and the effort they are putting in to maintaining their place as number one (well above anyone with a hope of calling themselves number two) search engine just have a skim through the latest Google blog.

And yes, I know my blog is begining to sound like an advert for Google but I am so impressed.

Google

Do you know how Google got its name? According to Google Milestones, in 1997 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Stanford computer science grad students, decided that the BackRub search engine they had created needed a new name. After some brainstorming, they went with Google - a play on the word "googol," a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflected their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
Google Milestones is a page about the history of Google – well worth reading.
 

Define:

I presume most people know that if you want to define a word you can put ‘Define: word’ into Google and it will list definitions from a host of sources. I was amused to find a glitch in the system the other day. When I put in ‘Define: Black Hole’ one of the definitions was “the point in the sky that is directly over the head of the observer.” Since the site seemed to be an educational one I went to it out of curiosity. Guess what the header of the page was -

Quiz

Directions: Match the vocabulary words on the left with the definitions on the right.

There then followed a list of words and a list of unrelated definitions alongside them – so presumably Google would, for example, define an eclipse as...... the force by which a planet or other such body tends to draw objects toward its center.

Oops!