Was Google Down or Hacked Yesterday?

When I tried to access Google yesterday at about 10:30 AM EST in Miami FL, it loaded very slowly and none of the links were functioning. I experienced the same slowness on Gmail and Adwords. I have been using Google since 2001 and this is the first time this has happened.

There are a lot of theories already on why this happened including hacker attacks, DNS misconfiguration, data server issues and etc. While we cannot get an official explanation from Google, I have another theory. (Call it a conspiracy theory)

Google went down because they’re making massive changes to their search algorithms. For those of you who do not know what a Google Algorithm is; it’s a ranking method used by Google to decide which sites rank at the top of search engines.

With the introduction of Universal Search and emphasis on Local Search, Google has been working very hard to make the search results more relevant for users to achieve a better search experience (Thus increasing / stabilizing their market share and making sure they remain the ultimate search engine 5 years from now). However, all this change does not happen all at once.

That’s exactly what Google did when they did the infamous “Florida Update” in 2003. They made a bunch of changes in algorithm without testing first which resulted in a fiasco and the illogical re-arrangement of top search results for the whole state of Florida. Some actually argue that Google did this on purpose; I hardly think so because it was a PR disaster for them as it affected their promise of stability and relevance.

So, why did Google go down yesterday? Because they took it down. They had 2 options;

1- Make the changes to their algorithm while they were 100% up and risk another fiasco like the Florida Update in 2003.

2- Take some of the data centers down for a couple of hours to test the major algorithm changes they have applied and make sure they do not cause any major issues.

I strongly believe they choose option 2. Of course many tech geeks will disagree with me and argue the fact that Google does not have to do anything like this to test a bunch of changes and I would agree to disagree. If you are as big as Google where, if you go down, people will recognize it quickly and thousands blogs are written about your company, you must be very careful with the moves you make. I’m sure this was thoroughly discussed and executed carefully by Google Engineers.

Then again, we as online marketers want everything about Google to be about SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and news related to our industry. Please tell me what you think?

-Duran Inci

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