Fuddland

When Google decided to draw everyone’s attention to Gaston Julia’s birthday, linking to an image search for Julia fractals, so many people clicked on the first couple of hits in the search that the server they were sitting on — at an Australian university — promptly failed.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, after the affected department quickly put up a small file explaining the situation, this new page got Slashdotted, again severely straining the server.

That’s the power of Google and Slashdot — if they decide to draw attention to a certain site, they can expect to see a huge surge in their traffic — and the person who runs the pages the fractals were on asks a few interesting questions:

Should Google ask permission before potentially sending huge traffic loads to a single page/server? Should they regulate traffic to individual sites/pages by changing the order of the search results? Is it the responsibility of the person who hosts the pages to protect her/himself? What are the good govenance responsibilities of these large traffic funnelling services?

[via paranoidfish.org]

#1

Gordon | 2004 / 02 / 06 – 17:18

Damn right they should - same goes for Slashdot, or Lockergnome or any of these services who typically swamp a server.

#2

lump | 2004 / 02 / 06 – 18:32

Of course Google shouldn’t regulate traffic by changing the order of search results - that would be the most ridiculous thing ever. For a start it would require that Google had some idea of bandwidth limitations on end sites; simply not possible. And it would be like asking for a ham sandwich at a cafe and getting something randomly that just happens to have ham in it thanks to regulating sandwich dispersal and not specifying “ham sandwich not eggs, not cheese, not pickle, not dead pigeon, not spam, …” It should return the most accurate and relevant results as possible. Full stop.

Should it ask for permission to link? A direct link, perhaps, but if the link is to a query within its own server farm then of course not. And thereafter the relevance over possible bandwidth horror should take precedence.

Even /. is a source of new and relevant material. The fact it’s popular is not its fault and it shouldn’t be required to ask permission first; that would destroy the whole system immediately and give fuel to those who would try to stop anyone from deep-linking. Besides, it’s simply not feasible.

Once someone publishes something to the web they are responsible for it. “Something bad has happened; it must be someone else’s fault!” I hate that attitude.

#3

David | 2004 / 02 / 06 – 18:42

I think I’m with Lump on this one — if one of your pages gets too popular and you can’t afford or cope with the bandwidth demands, then you’ll need to pull the page. Complaining about too much traffic kind of misses the point of a public internet site.

#4

David | 2004 / 02 / 06 – 18:44

Re #3: Not that the webmaster for the fractal page was actually complaining — I’m talking generally. :)

#5

steve | 2004 / 02 / 06 – 19:30

Yep, I’m with Lump and yourself. If you put a site on the Internet then you are agreeing to the pros and cons that come with that. Great publicity also brings with it possible hack attempts and DOS but there you go. If people don’t like that concept then let them write it down and post it to the world!

#6

Phil | 2004 / 02 / 07 – 00:34

OK, this isn’t related to the current entry at all, but do you have some weird left/right shading going on with the background of your blog entries and comments? It’s either that or my (relatively new) TFT monitor is on the way out.

#7

David | 2004 / 02 / 07 – 00:51

Re #6: No… it’s obviously your monitor. You might as well give it to me. ;)

Just kidding — yeah, the other week I added a bit of shading to the right of the entries and the left of comments and blockquotes, to make things look a bit less flat. The images are transparent PNGs, so unfortunately IE users don’t get to see them — have a look at the site in IE to verify your monitor isn’t giving up the ghost. :)

#8

Jann | 2004 / 02 / 07 – 10:07

Yeah, I too agree with Lump. In fact, I told him to say it…

This is starting to sound like an old French and saunders sketch.

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