Google Broken
Google, that web search engine that we've all come to love seems to be a broke down piece of honky. For the past several days, all of my attempts to reach that most-beloved of internet portals have been met with poor performance issues. This includes, but is not limited to: Google search, Google images, News.google.com, and, worst offender of all, blogspot.com. Now blogspot I can forgive because it's just a small project for Google, and it's about the same amount of performance I would expect from any community network its size, but news? images? SEARCH? Here's what pops up on my screen when I type http://www.google.com into my browser.

1. Firefox sits there with the string "Connecting to www.google.com..." in its status bar. This does not change.

2. Sixty painful seconds of the status bar informing us that we're doing something that we actually aren't, then this message appears in a modal popup window: "Alert. The operation timed out when attempting to contact www.google.com"

3. Typing "http://www.suck.com" into the browser does not yield similar results, and in fact I get to then read the content of suck.com, as the founders of the world wide web intended I do so.

Google, what is up, buddy? This exercise definitely woke me up to just how many of your products I use on a daily / hourly basis, and that number kind of scares me. But you know what, you do a lot of things right, and it irritates me when you do things wrong. Please, please, turn your search engine back on, otherwise I am going to lobby for socialized network directories and try to take that out of private hands.
- posted by frank crist @ 9:05 PM