While making some routine searches this morning, I found I was getting error messages from Google and it was an odd sensation. When you are used to using a tool and having it be reliable and quick, when it’s broke you arn’t quite sure what to do at first. I eventually gave up, and searched later when it came back up, but it supprised me that I was unable to really remember any other search engines that I could even want to use. Sure there could be altivista, or Yahoo, or MSN, but these didn’t really come to mind, let alone some of the newer ones I’ve heard about but would never use becasue of my bond to Google, and it’s browser toolbars.
Apparently, outage was due to a virus, as usuall it seems these days. People don’t patch their computers, or open an attachment from “Sal” that has “Hot deals for you on Via-GrA” and then pay the price. From technical perspective the virus is interesting. It looks at your “address book” and then searches Google and other engines for e-mail addresses that go along with the different domains (i.e. ben@bingo.com – the virus searches Google for other e-mails @bingo.com).
I thought about ranting concerning people who do dumb things with their computers, but then it’s not always their fault, and neither is it all Microsoft’s fault. But two things. One, after all these years of hearing on the news, and reading in the papers about not opening up e-mails from people you don’t know or wern’t expecting, you’d think people would learn. They don’t. Not that Microsoft has been doing better about letting their customers know, but hey let’s just release patch after patch and maybe it will be fixed someday.
