Google has been down for

Google has been down for most of the day (for me, at least), so I had to use, ugh, Altavista to search for something earlier. It’s the first time I’d used something other than Google in more than a year, and it took me about 3 times as long as normal to find what I was looking for. Google is useful enough that I would pay a $5-8 subscription fee per month for access to it. Google is the default command-line interface to the Web…and well worth paying for.

Speaking of, I posted something to StO about Google (third item) last month right before, well, you know. Here it is again:

“…I’m wondering to what extent frequently updated personal Web sites (hereafter referred to as “weblogs” for simplicity) affect Google’s search results. Consider that weblogs contain many links (links are Google’s food), are frequently updated with tons of information, are now spidered daily by Google, and frequently contain information about the things people are most searching for.

“My theory is that Google without the Personal Web would be a much poorer search utility than it currently is. Without all those weblogs, there would be little tying the Web together. From Google’s perspective, weblog authors are basically filling their database with connections to the rest of the Web (and more importantly, metadata about those connections).”