Considering all this attention, Firefox should have been a pretty hot search topic on Google that day. Right?

But no.

Looking at the top 100 trending topics on Google for June 30, there is no mention of Firefox to be seen anywhere. We looked at a couple of the following days as well, but with no luck there either.

We have no doubt that Firefox-related searches increased, but apparently not enough to make a dent as one of the top trending topics.

This says a lot about the average Web user: tech remains a niche topic. Even a major Web browser release didn’t make it into the top 100 trending searches on Google.

Like we’ve said before, “Tech just ain’t that hot on Google.”

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The question here is what will happen if your Internet connection goes down and you stop updating that heart rate. Will people start wondering if you died…?

That gives a whole new meaning to the word “uptime”, not to mention all the analogies that are used in networks and network monitoring, such as “heartbeats”, “keep-alive”, and “time to live”.

Found via Crunchgear.

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Here is Google’s presentation video (our buddy Steve Souders makes an appearance together with several other prominent Googlers):

Interestingly, the whole tone of this effort is almost philosophical, “let’s make the Web as fast as it can be for the good of the world.”

Nothing makes this more clear than looking at Google’s explanation of the purpose of this new website (from its FAQ):

Why is Google working on making the web faster? Why is it important to make the web fast? What could happen if the internet became faster?

The web is the most important platform of our times. Hundreds of millions of people use it daily to access information, to communicate and to view and share multimedia content. Improving the speed of the web will help not just Google but the entire web community because it will:

• Increase the number of internet users globally, thus making information more accessible
• Help developers produce better more responsive web apps, comparable in performance to desktop apps. This will make the web more engaging to current users, who will start using it more, for tasks that until now were only possible in desktop apps
• Help new applications and markets emerge

Overall we believe that speeding up the web will improve the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people.

What Google gives you

The code.google.com/speed website has three main sections:

• A learning section with tutorials
• A section with with downloadable tools
• The community itself (a Google Group)

You will probably get the most immediate benefit from the learning section, where Google has collected articles and other information about how to make websites faster.

In that section you can for example learn more about:

• Optimizing web graphics
• Optimizing JavaScript code
• PHP performance tips
• HTTP caching
• And much more, including various Google tech talks (video presentations)

We’re not sure what will actually come out of this in the long run, but it’s a good initiative and we hope it goes well. Making the Web as fast as it can be is something everyone should endorse, and we here at Pingdom are all for it (just look at our own little contribution to this, the free Full Page Load Test).

The original announcement from Google is available here.

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We will let Microsoft’s browser comparison table speak for itself…

And that was just the browser comparison page. They also have a “mythbusting” page with even more creative claims. Here’s an example from that section on Microsoft’s campaign site (emphasis in the last paragraph was added by us).

Myth #3: Firefox is a richer, more adaptable browser than Internet Explorer.

The Real Deal: Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, built in from the minute you open it.

Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you’re able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.

Did you know that there are more than 1,700 Internet Explorer 8 add-ons available at the Add-ons Gallery, with more being added every day? Partners all over the world are building Accelerators, Web slices, and Visual Search plug-ins for your browser, including Facebook, Amazon, eBay, and much more.

A quick look at the Mozilla Add-ons page for Firefox reveals that there are more than 5,000 Firefox add-ons available. So how does that hold up, Microsoft?

Ok, the spin is of course in the fine print “its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser,” but still, this almost brings to mind the spin-doctoring we did for the Save IE6 campaign (which was a joke).

We think it’s great that Microsoft is improving IE with new versions (and IE8 is a big leap forward), but maybe its marketing team was a bit too creative this time…

If you haven’t seen the breakdown of Microsoft’s IE8 marketing campaign over at Wired’s Webmonkey blog, check it out. It’s pretty entertaining.

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Financial Times just published an article about the “secret war on web crooks.” The article contains several interesting tidbits of information about spam and the challenges of trying to prevent it.

349.8 billion spam messages in 2008

Some spam statistics from the article (at least part of it is from Symantec):

• 349.6 billion spam messages were sent across the Internet in 2008.
• Almost 94% of all emails are spam.
• Nearly 90% of all spam is sent from botnets (hijacked home PCs controlled from the outside by the spammers).
• There are more than 9.4 million computers that have been hijacked and are used for, among other things, sending out spam (and since most people never notice that their PCs have been hijacked, they don’t do anything about it).

And let’s not forget that botnets are also often used for DDoS attacks.

And guess who’s paying the bill

As you can imagine it takes a lot of resources to battle all this spam. Speaking with FT, Michael O’Rierdan, chairman of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group – of which Google, Yahoo and many Internet service providers (ISPs) are members – estimates that most big ISPs have 5-10 employees hired just to look at spam, not to mention all the extra equipment and spam-filtering software that is needed and increased support costs for their customers.

And surprise, surprise, those costs are moved on to the ISP customers (i.e. YOU), who are the ones ultimately paying the bill. Patrick Peterson, CTO of Ironport Systems (the email security arm of Cisco) calls spam a “stealth tax on consumers.”

So there you have it. You can thank spammers for adding to your monthly Internet bill. (Don’t you just love spammers?)

The Financial Times article is a good read, so we recommend that you head on over to FT.com and check it out.

Photo credit: Spam wall by freezelight.

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The image below is from Verisign, and to simplify matters a bit it ignores the effect of caching (normally results are cached at various points along the chain):

Image source: Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, June 2007 (PDF), last page.

The chain of events to get the IP address for www.abc.com:

First your computer queries the name server (DNS server) it is set up to use. This is the recursive name server shown above.

The name server doesn’t know the IP address for www.abc.com, so it will start the following chain of queries before it can report back the IP address to your computer (the numbers below correspond to the numbers in the image).

1. Query the Internet root servers to get the name servers for the .com TLD.
2. Query the .com TLD name servers to get the authoritative name servers for abc.com.
3. Query the authoritative name servers for abc.com to finally get the IP address for the host www.abc.com, then return that IP address to your computer.
4. Done! Now that your computer has the IP address for www.abc.com, it can access that host.

This won’t be news to some of you, but you have to admit it’s a good picture! Definitely worth sharing.

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This looks to be Google’s own version of Yahoo’s YSlow tool. YSlow is also an add-on to Firefox (with Firebug) that tests web pages based on a set of criteria for what makes a fast-loading website and gives advice accordingly.

Of course, having multiple options is never a bad thing. And by testing their websites with both Yahoo’s Yslow and Google’s Page Speed, perhaps web developers and webmasters may gain some additional perspectives.

Ironically, the guy who created the first version of YSlow at Yahoo, Steve Souders, now works at Google. We don’t know if he’s been involved in this project but he’s got a wealth of experience in website speed optimization, so hopefully they picked his brain a bit when designing Page Speed.

We had a Q&A with Steve Souders about website performance a while back on this very blog that you might want to check out.

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2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

Have you ever wondered how you would actually SAY that number if you had to read it out loud? A cool thing with Wolfram Alpha is that it will spell out numbers for you, making it possible for us to find this out without too much of a headache. Here’s the text version of the number:

340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456

Read it out loud really fast. A bit of a mouthful…

We write about IPv6 from time to time in this blog. You might want to check out a couple of our previous articles:

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Why would you want to do that? Well, sometimes you may have such a huge amount of data that that sending it over the Internet simply isn’t practical, especially if you don’t have a killer Internet connection. It would just take way too long. We have written about this phenomenon in the past (FedEx still faster than the Internet). For example, Google uses this method to send large sets of data from the Hubble space telescope to universities (they jokingly call it FedExNet).

If uploading data to your Amazon S3 account would take a week or more over the Internet, you might want to consider sending it as snail mail instead. This table from Amazon has a few examples to illustrate this, depending on what kind of Internet connection you have:

Here are the scenarios Amazon has in mind for when you might want to use AWS Import/Export:

Data Migration – If you have data you need to upload into the AWS cloud for the first time, AWS Import/Export is often much faster than transferring that data via the Internet.
Offsite Backup – Send full or incremental backups to Amazon S3 for reliable and redundant offsite storage.
Direct Data Interchange – If you regularly receive content on portable storage devices from your business associates, you can have them send it directly to AWS for import into your Amazon S3 buckets.
Disaster Recovery* – In the event you need to quickly retrieve a large backup stored in Amazon S3, use AWS Import/Export to transfer the data to a portable storage device and deliver it to your site.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, has written a blog post explaining the reasoning behind this new service in detail. It’s a good read, so check it out. He makes the point that a service like this one is necessary because although networks are getting faster all the time, the amount of data we are generating is growing at an even faster rate.

It may sound like a backward solution, but he’s right. The Internet will soon support transfer speeds we can only dream about today, but just think about how much data will be living in the Cloud by then. (Yes, we used the C word… )

For now, the service is in limited beta and data will only be imported to S3 buckets in the United States, but support for Europe is coming. We think this is a good move by Amazon, and let’s face it, this whole sneakernet thing has a certain “cool factor” as well.

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Here are some of the main points they made about their setup:

• The service is distributed across 5 datacenters (colocation).
• It has two supercomputers from R Systems.
• About 10,000 processor cores.
• Hundreds of terabytes of disk space.
• Quad-board, dual-processor, quad-core Harpertown servers from Dell.
• And ”enough air conditioning for the Sahara to host a ski resort”.

End result: On launch day, Wolfram Alpha will be able to handle 175 million queries per day, over 5 billion queries per month. The Wolfram Alpha team hopes that that is more than enough capacity to make sure that their platform runs smoothly even during peak hours.

Not bad, right? We wish them the best of luck since it sounds like a very cool search engine and computational platform rolled into one. And as we know from other product launches in the past, launches can be tricky.

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