What is Google up to?

• Feb. 9, 2004

You have heard us talk about the Google dance and how, during the period known as the dance, Google performs an update to its index. Many webmasters and SEO's alike tend to lose sleep during this monthly ritual.

There is even a website devoted to the dance. If you go to google-dance.com you can perform a query across multiple data centers. At least you could until recently. Now if you use the google-dance website, you will see multiple "page cannot be displayed" pages. Could this be caused by some error at the google-dance site? No. In actual fact, once again Google made a change and didn't tell anyone.

Go figure, a privately owned company doing their own thing and not telling anyone. But that's a whole other topic.

The reason the google-dance site isn't working is that Google has changed the IP addresses of its data centers. I guess "changed" isn't actually the right word. In addition to changing the addresses for the data centers, they also added more addresses. The centers now use about 10 addresses each instead of just one.

So why would Google go through the effort of expanding the number of usable IP addresses? If it has always worked to utilize 1 IP per data center, is there another reason for the change?

There are many possibilities. One would be that Google is considering (or has already considered) ramping up services. Perhaps with the increased demands on their servers - vis-à-vis the recent algorithm changes - there are greater demands on their data centers due to the increased complexity of the calculations required to render the results.

Maybe they are looking at offering more user services. We have already heard rumors of Google email. Whether they offer email as a service, or use it as some form of email marketing. Or rather than only one new service, Google is gearing up to offer a host of new services? For example, if they were to buy a suite of internet properties, they would need somewhere to park them.

Maybe they are looking at expanding their crawling abilities - sending out more crawlers to index more of the web? Or perhaps they are looking to add more data centers. By adding more data centers, they could potentially update quicker, so that the dance only lasts a few hours, instead of a few days.

The possibilities are endless. This could also be an indication of the coming IPO. Even though CEO, Eric Schmidt, has stated that they haven't really announced an IPO, perhaps this is an indication (albeit somewhat vague) as to what their plans are with the money. To me, the 10 fold increase in IP addressed indicate that Google plans to go even bigger than they are now.

Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Enquiro.com