Google mystery server runs 13% of active websites The Google Web Server - custom-built server software used only by Google - now runs nearly 13 per cent of all active web sites, according to the latest survey data from the web-server-tracking UK research outfit Netcraft. Netcraft data has the Google Web Server (GWS) running nearly 11 million active sites - i.e., sites with …
"It sounds like Google almost IS the Internet!" .... David Halko Posted Friday 29th January 2010 20:32 GMT
It is much more likely to be a CIA/NSA/DOD/Skull and Bones Spooky front agent easily plausibly denied, David Halko. And if it is not, then it should have been and it is no wonder Uncle Sam is under global pressure and wilting/making dumb moves. FFS, if you don't have the brains for Great Games Intelligence, buy it in from abroad. It is not as if it is anything new to you cowboys, is it, for without the Nazis you would never have got into Space, and that is only one example of your flexibility to sensibilities.
They also drive it and you can only pay for the ride (with your eyeballs), you cannot OWN the f*** car. That is the problem. It used to be the desktop being a monoculture, now we are at risk of the web, mail and media delivery becoming monocultures as well.
That is why I still:
1. Run my own server and apps infrastructure at home
2. Run my own mail server, web server and VPN infrastructure to access it.
It may cost me more than paying a license for GoogleDocs for all members of the family, but it is MINE. MY PRESSSSSSSHIOUS...
Anything else besides - the web ain't Google and Google ain't the web. Same as Microsoft is not the PC and the PC is not Microsoft. At least as long as there are some of us who desist and resist it is not over and it is not a monoculture.
13% of active websites worldwide are google owned and you don't find that news-worthy? We're not talking about sites just happening to use software written by google, but actually run by the company - that's an incredible statistic.
What makes it even more interesting is that we're talking about a company who's mission is to collect information about us, so I'd be surprised if GWS doesn't feed IPs and browsing data directly back to Google HQ. So now we're talking about 13% of websites spy on us for a single corporation and unlike google-analytics, or other third party data-mining you can't block external content to prevent information gathering.
Maybe it IS based on Apache? It hardly matters though, with the level of customization that is likely to have occured I don't think it's fair to consider it to *be* Apache in any meaningful sense. Apache is based on the NCSA httpd server, after all, but nobody would consider Apache to be an NCSA installation.
Or maybe it's not. There already were (as of 2007, when the data shows Google's web server started taking off) several servers faster than apache which would be likely candidates for them to start out from; also, if they have a lot of stuff written in a particular language (python for instance) they could have chosen web server software written in that language.
Lastly, writing a basic web server isn't too complex, and may have been the way to go compared to trying to modify an existing web server (for speed, and to better fit in Google's Map/Reduce architecture). So I wouldn't be surprised if Google's browser was written from scratch either.
... backhaul for the other three billion.
Google has interests in O3B too. This is an organisation that is putting a string of MEO satellites up over the equator that are planned to provide instant backhaul infrastructure to a sizable chunk of humanity, pretty much instantly.
These guys like to think big.
I had no idea that Google's network had become so prolific. Not just the network but the proprietary nature of the networking kit and servers sounds really weird. The higher temp resilient chips for the server farms sounds sensible enough, it means they can run their datacenters warmer, or run more servers for the same cooling system, bu I'm stumped as to why they would need to build their own routers and switches.
I've been involved with companies building up connections to form the internet since 1995, including tier-1 providers and I've never come across onw who builds their own routers and servers.
There is something more to this than meets the eye. It seems spooky but I can't put my finger on exactly why.
Hmmm.
This post has been deleted by its author
Are we Googling, or are we about to get Googled? Looks like Google is moving toward absolute power over the Internet as it is an international entity unto itself, all financed by advertising revenues.
Seems mad to me. About the only thing that will stop them is some higher power paying some attention to them. Will we soon see the monopoly trial of this century? If enough governments smell money in it, it will happen.
"Surely it is not Dark Fiber if Google are using it to transfer data?"
In datacomms dark fiber is a product -- a pair of fibers between two points, usually metro; a map showing the path of the fiber; and a SLA on the time to repair reported fibre breaks. Longer spans will come with colo and power for customer-provided regeneration.
The customer lights the fiber with whatever technology they wish. If the customer wishes to upgrade from, say, 1Gbps to 10Gbps the customer provisions their own optics and they pay no more or less to the owner of the fiber.
The customer arranges their own protection, if that is required. They can use the map to ensure diversity.
The owner cannot detect failures of the service. That responsibility falls to the customer.
Compare with "managed service", which specifies framing and speeds, usually provides protection and has its availability monitored by the provider. Even so, for cluefull large customers managed services are usually less economic than dark fiber, as managed services usually have a hefty charge for increased speeds which increases the lifetime cost of ownership. Managed services also preclude the use of CWDM equipment for a simple integration of telephony, data and SAN across the fibre span.
Don't forget that Google also has a web hosting platform - Google Pages I think it's called. That 13m sites undoubtedly includes sites on their Pages service, just like IIS includes sites hosted on Windows Live.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some ad-tracking code snuck into the sites on Pages though...
If you own/run the server you don't need to sneak tracking code into the pages themselves, you have full access to the server logs. In Google's case they probably have their server application process that data directly, feeding the IP, URL/Content and other information directly into their all-seeing tracking database before the webpage is even served back to you.
This vast hosting business in not at all remarkable. Netcraft's own story, for this month, tells of China's Tencent - with their 30 million web blogs - which went public last autumn, and (just as significantly) went private again, this month. 30 million! In December, qq.com occupied 13% of the web. I feel a misquote, coming on... It's as if 30 million web domains cried out and went silent (or whatever), but those 30 million web blogs are actually still there; it's just that Tencent arn't letting Netcraft look at them any more.
Even Nginx beats Google Web Server - and guess what? Igor Sysoev's Nginx is almost exclusively used by another web search company. Rambler.
And that bulge in IIS usage from Spring 2006 to spring 2009? That was was mostly Microsoft-hosted web blogs, too. About 25 million of them, at their peak. Most were sitched off, early last year when their renewal time came up: it's an expensive business, hosting 25 million dead web pages.
However, since it's no longer fashionable to be afraid of Microsoft, should we perhaps be afraid of Tencent - or even Rambler - instead of Google? Maybe was the rumour that Google could launch their websites in under 45 minutes - but regardless, it seems we're all baying for regime change in Mountain View. Presumably it's the threat that they could monopolise the market in dead web pages.
This ultra top-secret massively replicated infrastructure means that The Occasional Stevie (the truest thing ever put on Teh Interweb) is located on exactly the sort of robust, atom bomb-proof platform it should have had all along!
All hail Google! Praise them with great praise!
The Google rox!
1.) massive reduction in number of people hosting with IIS or claiming to host with IIS.
2.) massive increase in number of people hosting with GWS or claiming to host with GWS
3.) all of the above is taken from the headers that can be customised.
4.) GWS seems a lot less prone to attack than IIS so to appear less vulnerable to attack, change the headers in IIS so it looks like your domain / IP / whatever is hosted on GWS
or am I missing something?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
