Ask HN: Google Search down?

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/google-electrical-incide...

Three people in critical condition after Google data center 'electrical incident' in the Council Bluffs, Iowa datacenter (us-central region, I believe)

hoofhearted · 3 years ago

An arc blast isn’t anything to play with! It’s an electrically charged fireball that is 4 times hotter than the sun at the point of the arc. Pretty much instant 3rd degree burns, while simultaneously getting zapped and hit with an explosive shockwave.

https://youtu.be/-iClXrd50Z8 https://youtu.be/PO6see7_ODY

shadowgovt · 3 years ago

The physics of those things is scary.

If I recall correctly, the mitigating PPE for expecting an arc flash is reflective, because so much of the energy imparted on a victim is straight-up electromagnetic radiation. You get lightbulbed to death.

dgrin91 · 3 years ago

Seems unrelated. This happened ~10 hours ago.

prescriptivist · 3 years ago

10 hours ago we had a flood of network failures in us-central1 and saw no GCP status changes. We blindly attempted to mitigate in various ways (freezing HPAs because we thought that we were making excessive calls to external infra and getting throttled) and it resolved itself eventually. Maybe we were at fault the entire time but not seeing this issue exposed up on the GCP dashboard is infuriating.

lupire · 3 years ago

Could be related if eng tried to route traffic away from Council Bluffs after the accident (shut down data center for safety inspection/repair?) and failed.

utopcell · 3 years ago

not at all relevant to this outage

breput · 3 years ago

Do you have anything to add about the root cause?

Down in Sydney. Intermittent errors when searching.

How am I supposed to work? Also, I don't remember when Google Search was last down. Either google has great uptime, or I have terrible memory.

matheweis · 3 years ago

Bing works pretty well most of the time. I switched my personal primary search engine to bing around the beginning of this year after noticing a marked degradation of Google search quality.

In fact, anecdotally, Bing is markedly better at narrow search results (quoted phrases, excluding or including specific words, etc).

Google on the other hand is significantly better at what I’d call fuzzy searches, where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for but have some vague idea (some esoteric spelling, or that type of apple that has unique properties but you can’t remember the name of, etc.)

theonemind · 3 years ago

I feel like I need to read the manual for specific Google searches. Sometimes, it seems to drop an important search term and not give a suggestion link to include it. +term doesn’t help sometimes. It seems like +”term” usually does.

It seems overfitted to delivering results with mass appeal. Perhaps I’ll try bing the next time I get that tingling feeling google will throw out the search terms intended to narrow down what I want to find.

collegeburner · 3 years ago

I've had to search stuff in bing because for some reason google had only the shitty mirror sites for github issues/stackoverflow/whatever indexed. I could literally do a quote search and not get the original source.

tamrix · 3 years ago

Using bing is just coding on hard mode.

nigelgutzmann · 3 years ago

My memory suffers more outages than Google Search for sure!

samstave · 3 years ago

Hi! My name is Sam.

pca006132 · 3 years ago

Try Duckduckgo? Indeed, I don't remember when Google search was down last time either.

matheweis · 3 years ago

DDG is mostly (but not all) Bing (context, yegg is the founder of DDG): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490994

narrator · 3 years ago

Go over to the dark side http://Yandex.com . It's the only thing that's decent that doesn't rely on Google or Bing.

midoridensha · 3 years ago

DDG is great, but as the other commenter said, it uses Bing mostly as its underlying search engine, which might not get you the results you're looking for (it's better at some things than Google, worse at others). For privacy though, DDG is great so I use it as my first-line search and then go to Google if I really need to.

zorpner · 3 years ago

> How am I supposed to work?

Whatever happened to the man pages, y'know.

jeffbee · 3 years ago

Am I the only person who primarily reads man pages on the web?

zbird · 3 years ago

You can work without being tracked and profiled here: https://duckduckgo.com/

Jerry2 · 3 years ago

DDG censors too much.

ontouchstart · 3 years ago

Wikipedia is fast

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/110326202...

FirstLvR · 3 years ago

yeah am blaffed how good wikipedia is covering current events

cowmoo728 · 3 years ago

One time I was sitting in the New York metropolitan opera and heard Javier Camarena give an encore performance, which is quite rare. Immediately after the encore, it went to intermission. Once I walked out to the lobby, I checked his Wikipedia article on my phone and it had already been updated to note that he had just done an encore performance at the Met. It was insane how fast it was.

dylan604 · 3 years ago

How many 3rd party websites are available to corroborate these new edits?

antupis · 3 years ago

And how reliable Google services are that you can have that kind article.

gzer0 · 3 years ago

https://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/06/26/michael.jackson.internet...

This reminds me of the distant past. The death of Michael Jackson resulted in (almost literally) the entire internet suffering an outage.

habibur · 3 years ago

More than that on 9/11. Every news site, online forum any online resource for news you can think of was unaccessible for hours. TV turned out to be the only news source.

digitalsushi · 3 years ago

I was working at an ISP on 9/11. We were still online but none of our customers were getting anything (dialup modems) ... so people started calling our tech support number to read them the news. Or to get info about loved ones. That was a long day. I left a different person than I showed up as. Didn't we all though.

mkl · 3 years ago

I seem to remember Slashdot holding up.

wbl · 3 years ago

TV had two channels in NJ: a lot of stations liked the towers and it took them a few days to rig up alternates.

soraminazuki · 3 years ago

The difference in internet adoption rate between those two time periods likely plays a key role in that.

hedora · 3 years ago

Cell / landlines were dicey too.

marginalia_nu · 3 years ago

Google clearly saw my search engine's week-long outage as I reconstructed the index and felt confused and intimidated by the revelation that 89.9999% also is five nines.

toast0 · 3 years ago

Everybody wants nine nines, but you achieved eight eights, which is pretty close? :)

erklik · 3 years ago

djsavvy · 3 years ago

Gonna use this as a chance to pub https://search.brave.com

I switched to this from DuckDuckGo several months ago because Brave uses their own index, while DDG famously uses Bing's. The results are a lot better in my experience and it feels like the search engine is built for me instead of for advertisers. Brave search just feels like cleaner, quieter tech. I've also never seen NSFW results on an innocuous search (a problem I had regularly with DDG). On the rare occasion I end up using Google, seeing the results page is a jarring (and slightly stressful) experience with all of the distractions and irrelevant results.

Dead Comment

redcitylights · 3 years ago

https://downdetector.com/status/google/

Yes, intermittently.

mmaunder · 3 years ago

Was broken for me a few mins ago with 500 errors on various searches.

jhickok · 3 years ago

Search is currently not working most of the time for me.

comboy · 3 years ago

It's been like that for years.

muser8 · 3 years ago

oh my, classic