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Ask HN: Google Search down?

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Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#271

Post by josephcsible »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #259
quickthrower2 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yellow address bar when getting near to expiration would also work, right without changes to what expiration means. Then people using SSL will renew earlier to avoid embarrassment.

That's also arguably acceptable, yes, though the renewal timeline is already quite aggressive if you aren't able to use ACME for whatever particular reason. I have yet to see any example of a real security risk involving a barely expired certificate. It seems that we invented a way to make the web extremely fragile for... really no good reason.

> if you aren't able to use ACME for whatever particular reason.

What are some technical reasons you might not be able to do this? I've only ever seen stupid bureaucratic reasons firsthand.

Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#272

Post by ocdtrekkie »

josephcsible wrote: post #271
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also arguably acceptable, yes, though the renewal timeline is already quite aggressive if you aren't able to use ACME for whatever particular reason. I have yet to see any example of a real security risk involving a barely expired certificate. It seems that we invented a way to make the web extremely fragile for... really no good reason.

> if you aren't able to use ACME for whatever particular reason. What are some technical reasons you might not be able to do this? I've only ever seen stupid bureaucratic reasons firsthand.

So a lot of times you may be feeding a certificate into a bespoke enterprise application. Some of them just load it into IIS and off you go, but some of them end up being Java platform crud where you need weird incantations just to import them at all. (And sometimes it's those same weird applications that also decide to opt you into HSTS...)

Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#273

Post by jeffbee »

zorpner wrote: post #231
erklik wrote: post #69

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.

> How am I supposed to work? Whatever happened to the man pages, y'know.

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

Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#274

Post by jeffbee »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #258
russellbeattie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so in round numbers, Google makes roughly $65 billion in profit per quarter. Dividing by 90, is around $722 million per day, which is roughly $200,000 per second. 2 minutes is quite the expensive fuckup.

Expensive for you, but for Google it is nothing. A bug in their Ad placement stack would cost more.

Google ads outages often have positive revenue impact because with the quality systems down or impaired they may briefly serve tons of junk that pays a lot but users hate.

Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#275

Post by BurningPenguin »

whimsicalism wrote: post #264
BurningPenguin wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google simply shows you what it thinks you want to see, as long as nobody (with money) complains. Yandex shows you what the Russian state wants you to see. And they aren't even subtle.

Do you have an example? A simple search of information around the Russia-Ukraine conflict has Yandex actively suggesting I search for the "Russian-Ukraine war" (despite references to a war being illegal in Russia) and the first result is a Russian wikipedia article that seems, if anything, pro-Ukraine. Looking up "Putin election" delivers me several prominent articles saying Russia's most recent election was fraudule…

I'm in Germany. I simply searched for "Ukraine" and set the result language to "German". The first two results are from "Russia Today" and "News-Front", both well known for skewing facts or outright lying. "News-Front" for example reports that Putin is supposedly very popular in Germany and Austria. This isn't true at all. The only people who are worshiping him are the far-right and far-left. They are not the majority.

Searching for "Deutschland" results in "deutschland.de" which is ok but then, once again, followed by "News-Front" and "anti-spiegel", some crappy Wordpress conspiracy blog. I also took the liberty to search for "Proteste in Deutschland" (protests in Germany), and low and behold: First 3 results: Wikipedia, "Russia Today" and "Report24". The last one yet another propaganda website run by "Querdenker" (our version of Qanon-style Antivaxx nutjobs).

Searching for "Ukraine Krieg" (Ukraine war) once again leads to RT and News-Front.

"Energiewende" is also a quite popular word in Germany. What does yandex say to this? Again, first 2 results are ok. Third result? That shitty Querdenker page "Report24" again. 5th result is Russia Today. And somewhere at the end i even spot "Reitschuster", a known right-extremist blog.

There is no way in hell, that these websites are so well optimized, that they outperform every single outlet in existence, for pretty much every keyword i can think of just now. Especially not some shitty Wordpress page (Report24) that was clicked together in mere days and online for just a single year.

Searching for these keywords in the localized version of Google and even Bing gives wildly different results. There is no sign that any outlets are preferred. Sometimes i see right-leaning sources on the top of the first page, sometimes it's left-leaning, other times it's some trash tabloid like the "BILD".

So either their search algorithm is complete and utter trash, or they are actively boosting pro-russian websites and mix them up with a few established news outlets, to make them seem more trustworthy. Since their "news" section is also only allowed to show state-approved media, my guess wouldn't be very far off.

Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#276

Post by BurningPenguin »

coffeeblack wrote: post #265
BurningPenguin wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google simply shows you what it thinks you want to see, as long as nobody (with money) complains. Yandex shows you what the Russian state wants you to see. And they aren't even subtle.

Google too seems to ideologically clean up certain search results.

Not really. They may filter some stuff, if it is outright illegal and has caused enough outrage or someone complains about copyright. And if you have an account there, they'll try and give you results you most likely want to read. Which opens up the risk to end up in an echo chamber.

Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#277

Post by BurningPenguin »

coffeeblack wrote: post #267
whimsicalism wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example? A simple search of information around the Russia-Ukraine conflict has Yandex actively suggesting I search for the "Russian-Ukraine war" (despite references to a war being illegal in Russia) and the first result is a Russian wikipedia article that seems, if anything, pro-Ukraine. Looking up "Putin election" delivers me several prominent articles saying Russia's most recent election was fraudule…

Interesting, I never used Yandex tbh. I thought it was under indirect state control, like vk and others. Will try to use it more often to see what results it has.

They are. Their news section only has media that is state approved. They probably don't even have much of a choice, if they don't want to be shut down...

Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#279

Post by whimsicalism »

BurningPenguin wrote: post #275
whimsicalism wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example? A simple search of information around the Russia-Ukraine conflict has Yandex actively suggesting I search for the "Russian-Ukraine war" (despite references to a war being illegal in Russia) and the first result is a Russian wikipedia article that seems, if anything, pro-Ukraine. Looking up "Putin election" delivers me several prominent articles saying Russia's most recent election was fraudule…

I'm in Germany. I simply searched for "Ukraine" and set the result language to "German". The first two results are from "Russia Today" and "News-Front", both well known for skewing facts or outright lying. "News-Front" for example reports that Putin is supposedly very popular in Germany and Austria. This isn't true at all. The only people who are worshiping him are the far-right and far-left. They are not the majorit…

interesting. I see what you mean when I just search "Ukraine" on Yandex in English, with both RT & Sputnik featuring prominently.

Multi-word searches seem less prone to this. What happens if you search "Putin election" in German? Do you get articles critiquing the election or still praiseworthy articles?

Re: Ask HN: Google Search down?

#280

Post by BurningPenguin »

whimsicalism wrote: post #279
BurningPenguin wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Germany. I simply searched for "Ukraine" and set the result language to "German". The first two results are from "Russia Today" and "News-Front", both well known for skewing facts or outright lying. "News-Front" for example reports that Putin is supposedly very popular in Germany and Austria. This isn't true at all. The only people who are worshiping him are the far-right and far-left. They are not the majorit…

interesting. I see what you mean when I just search "Ukraine" on Yandex in English, with both RT & Sputnik featuring prominently. Multi-word searches seem less prone to this. What happens if you search "Putin election" in German? Do you get articles critiquing the election or still praiseworthy articles?

"Putin wahl": First result is a marketplace in Russian. Everything else on the first page seems to be German + 1 Austrian, and they're quite critical, of course. RT and the other Russian propaganda pages only show up at page 5, but none of them mention the election.

I do get several captcha requests from the website now. Might be coincidence, because i'm on a different computer now. It does get annoying, though. Like, really annoying. Clicking 1 or 2 pages leads to yet another captcha.

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