Sponsor's Message

I guess that was an easy question -- the answer is almost certainly the wonderful Google search engine.

Google today announced that it has indexed 6 billion items. Think about that for a moment... six BILLION items.

If each of those items were printed out on a piece of regular photocopy paper, that'd represent a stack 170,000 Kms high!

If you were trying to equal this feat and started from scratch, your software would have to index over 180 items per second for an entire year.

Next time you do a search on Google, stop and think about how wonderful the technology really is.

Hit Enter or click the "Google Search" button and you'll search over 4 billion webpages in just a second or two -- truly astonishing.

Readers Say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums

Clearly Microsoft have an uphill road ahead of them if they want to wrest the search-engine crown from Google's vice-like grip.

But, as we all know, power like this can be used both for good and for evil [places little finger against corner of mouth].

A good example of the inadvertent evil to which Google can be put was the recent "Googleblatting" of an Australian website. The full story can be found here but in essence: it appears that when Google directed traffic to this site it crashed in a screaming heap -- totally overwhelmed by the volumes created.

But this unintentional denial of service type attack is not unique to Google, there are other sites such as SlashDot which can produce similarly huge spikes in traffic that sometimes threaten to bowl webservers for six.

The Australian site asks a very important question -- should there be some kind of protocol or netiquette associated with directing large volumes of traffic to other websites?

While having your site blasted off the web by a tsunami of eager visitors is one thing, finding yourself hit with a massive bill for excess data charges (as can happen with some hosting plans) is another.

Perhaps it's time for yet another "policy" page on websites.

All good websites have both a Privacy Policy and a Linking Policy, perhaps there's time for a "tsunami policy" -- or at the very least, those sites wishing to avoid a Slashdotting or Googleblatting should mention this in their linking policies.

New Forums!
Yes folks, good news. The grotty ezboard forums have been replaced with a new phpBBS-based system that won't assault you with a myriad of pop-ups and other flotsam.

A big thanks to Managed Internet Solutions for offering to provide this service.

You can access the new forums over at aardvarkforums.co.nz

If you feel that this is a good thing and/or you hold a "geniune affection" for yours truly -- then you are welcome to gift me some money using the buttons provided. In gifting this money you accept that no goods, service or other consideration is offered, provided, accepted or anticipated in return. Just click on the button to gift whatever you can afford. NOTE: PayPal bills in US dollars so don't accidentally gift more than what you were intending :-)

Contacting Aardvark
I'm always happy to hear from readers, whether they're delivering brickbats, bouquets or news tip-offs. If you'd like to contact me directly, please this form. If you're happy for me to republish your comments then please be sure and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!