Are users killing Google?

I hope you’re happy. You’re killing Google. Your constant tinkering in Google Earth and compulsion for Google Video is draining the search giant of its resources. Google is running out of server room and it’s your fault.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt stunned the blogosphere last month when he told the New York Times, in reference to Google’s hardware being handle the sheer volume of daily information: Those machines are full. We have a huge machine ‘crisis’.

Huge machine crisis? Is that why sites have been dropping in out of Google for the past four months? Or why some users say their sites haven’t been crawled since January? I thought infrastructure upgrades were supposed to make things run better? Isn’t that what Google promised us, smarter crawling and better indexing?

Google released its Bigdaddy update in January, a major infrastructure update that was designed to make Google more efficient. However, since its inception, webmasters have reported problems such as being trapped in the supplemental index, not having their sites crawled for weeks, receiving irrelevant Google News alerts, and failing to rank for terms they once dominated. It has caused many site owners to wonder just what exactly is going on.

Are the lost rankings merely due to algorithm changes? Or is there really a hardware crisis that users should be aware of? If there is a hardware crisis, what is Google doing to remedy it? Schmidt’s mention of the buzz word was enough to send many site owners into frenzied behavior. The Register even reported that Google was ‘choking on web spam’. Whatever the problem is, it’s only getting worse. Search Engine Watch’s Barry Schwartz:

“This week, problems have gotten worse, webmasters all over the forums are reporting sever issues with pages dropping in and out of the index, pages not being crawled, old cached pages, dead (404) pages being returned by Google and outright irrelevant results.”

In the now famed NYT article, Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets called Google’s capital spending “unfathomably high” and says:

“If Google’s market share continues to increase, and its position as the central hub of the Internet is reinforced, an extra $1 billion is a worthwhile investment,” Rohan said. “The day market share peaks, we have a problem.”

I can’t even begin to imagine what Google’s costs to maintain their various servers and databases are. It is surely more money than my little brain can even comprehend. But I do know the day Google has a problem, the rest of us do too. So I beg you, stop killing Google.

For those experiencing problems, Barry has posted a bunch of forum threads that touch on all the most recent Google issues. We recommend you check that out.

(Hat-Tip SEW)

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.

Comments (1)
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One Reply to “Are users killing Google?”

Google: a huge machine ‘crisis’

There’s an interesting post on Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog about some problem that google may be facing right now. It seems that users are killing Google… All the bandwith traffic generated from Google Earth, Google Video, and so on is smashi…

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