Who is watching who?

[peteshimmon]

I like to check who's online sometime to note
if anything I post gets a read quickly. Now for
the third time I find "P" there as well. Its a
bit like Van Cleef checking the street scene and
finding Eastwood looking back at him

[Jeff Root]

"p"?

[peteshimmon]

Sorry Jeff I will not say who P is, this was a
half joke. Now as an adjunct to this subject,
sometimes I enjoy seeing if Google has indexed
our words and how quickly. One of my recent
posts was quickly up. But then it reverted
to a less up to date reading of the thread in
the cashe! I wonder, do some scumbags like to
read the cashe to prevent the thread hit
number being incremented? And does Google have
a system to scotch this if it seems to be
happening? Only asking

[01101001]

One of my recent posts was quickly up. But then it reverted to a less up to date reading of the thread in the cashe! I wonder, do some scumbags like to read the cashe to prevent the thread hit number being incremented? And does Google have a system to scotch this if it seems to be happening? Only asking

Scumbags? Why so offensive?

Which Google server did you perform your experiment on -- not that you have a lot of control over the choice. The servers can't be perfectly synchronized. I do believe you may get different results with different probes.

[peteshimmon]

Not really being offensive, just amused at the
possibility. Google certainly had the thread
up to date in the cache for a day or two then it
reverted to an older cache. A little bit of
paranoid thinking brings an explanation. Cache..
Cache..Cache.. my spelling will be correct..

[01101001]

Google certainly had the thread
up to date in the cache for a day or two then it
reverted to an older cache.

Reverted? The cache -- as if there were only one? You mean some Google server had a more recent version and then later that same server had an older version? No... you couldn't know that. Maybe: one Google server had a more recent version and then later some (probably other) server had an older version? Isn't that to be expected? I'm quite unsure of what anomaly is perplexing you.

If you expect all Google servers to conduct themselves as if they are updated synchronously, always providing chronologically correct updates among them, well, would you understand if I suggested you update your expectations?

When you measure how quickly "Google has indexed our words and how quickly", aren't you sampling from a limited number of servers? How do you extrapolate from what those servers tell you, to what Google, in its entirety, has done?

Baseline: How Google Works (from way back in July 2006, so numbers are probably quite obsolete):

Google runs on hundreds of thousands of servers—by one estimate, in excess of 450,000—racked up in thousands of clusters in dozens of data centers around the world. It has data centers in Dublin, Ireland; in Virginia; and in California, where it just acquired the million-square-foot headquarters it had been leasing. It recently opened a new center in Atlanta, and is currently building two football-field-sized centers in The Dalles, Ore.

By having its servers and data centers distributed geographically, Google delivers faster performance to its worldwide audience, because the speed of the connection between any two computers on the Internet is partly a factor of the speed of light, as well as delays caused by network switches and routers.

[Roy Batty]

Baseline: How Google Works (from way back in July 2006, so numbers are probably quite obsolete):

No No No No No, you have it all wrong, this is how Google really works!