On Sun, 1 Feb 2009, Robert Ackland wrote:
But I think it is somewhat troubling that the increasingly important service of online search can be compromised (even just for an hour) by a research project.
"Online search" was never compromised. As you also mentioned, Google is not the only search engine. In fact it's only one among many capable search engines. QUT's Amanda Spink and collaborators compared major search engines and found very little overlap which means (my interpretation) that focussing too much on Google is not a good idea anyway. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150972
This might be a bit of a stretch, but what if water or electricity services were inadvertently cut or restricted because of a research project focusing on "consumer complaints".
Does it really matter what caused Google's problem? The lesson to learn is that more search engine variety is good for all of us (even de-fusing the single-point-of-failure scenario you seem to be concerned about) Best regards christopher -- Dr. Christopher Lueg Professor of Computing University of Tasmania Private Bag 100 Hobart TAS 7001, Australia christopher.lueg@utas.edu.au http://www.cis.utas.edu.au/users/clueg/ CRICOS Provider Code: 00586B