What is a Google Datacenter?

According to Google, it is evaluation of these cached pages that determines what pages will be returned in the Google search results for any keyword or phrase searched for. "The cached content is the content Google uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query." - It may be helpful to think of these cached pages as "books" in a Library.

It may be helpful to think of Datacenters as Libraries (a place you would go to look for information of interest). Entering "www.google.com" in your browser address field would "take you to your local Google (library)".

Entering "www.google.com" into your browser would take you to one IP address. To understand "IP Address" - Think of a url such as "www.google.com" as the "name of a business" and "IP Address" as the business' physical address on the internet. Google's main IP Address was 216.239.41.99.

Prior to January 2004, Google used basically one location in the US to search for data. It did have 10 known Datacenters at the time which seemed to come into play ONLY when Google was reorganizing and updating its data. 

As internet traffic grew, so did the dependency of being able to locate information on the internet. Some locations experienced much higher traffic than did others. When this occurred, the highly trafficked areas began to get bogged down thus taking longer times to deliver results.

In January 2004, most of the old 10 known Datacenters became unreachable at their corresponding IP Addresses. Knowing that Google needed somewhere to store and reorganize it's data, a few SEO's started playing around with "pinging" variations of the old IP Addresses in an attempt to find where they had moved to. It was discovered by this method in early January, that Google has what turned out to eventually be 61 (mostly new) Datacenters that could be reached at 61 different IP Addresses.

Currently (January, 2005), there are only 26 remaining of the 61 discovered in January 2004.  - See History of Datacenters

    If it is behind the scenes, how do we know this? This was discovered while "pinging" to locate new Datacenters. There are two ways you can verify this for yourself. The easy way is to use this little utility I made to ping from a web location. It is already set up with Google's www.google.com url so basically all you need to do is hit the "ping" button and wait a few seconds for the results to appear in the window. Keep your eye on the IP Address returned and hit the "ping" button again. If it is a busy time of day, you most likely will see the IP Address change to a different IP Address.

You should also note that the first thing reported is something like this - "Pinging www.google.akadns.net [64.233.161.99] with 32 bytes of data". It reports to you the specific location or specifically which Datacenter you are being sent to to perform you search on Google.

Ping Utility

Note: You can "copy and paste" any IP Address into the address bar of a browser window and hit enter on you keyboard and you will be taken to the site located at that address. For example, one of the current IP Addresses for Google is [ 64.233.161.99 ]. Copy (just the numbers not the brackets) and paste it in you browser address bar and hit enter. You will be taken to an old familiar Google window. The difference is you will be at A specific Datacenter of you own determination.

If you are skeptical, you can "ping" right from your own computer (if you are using Windows and are able to open a DOS prompt) .

• Open your MS-DOS prompt window (Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > MS-DOS Prompt.
• Simply type in at the prompt C:\WINDOWS>ping  www.google.com  the hit ENTER on your keyboard.
• To repeat - simply hit the UP arrow on your keyboard then hit enter again.
• You can actually use either my little "Ping Utility" or your own DOS Prompt to find the IP Address of any site on the internet.

Here is an example of one of my searches Datacenter Quick Check results 2/1/2005.

IP Addresses are generally grouped together like this group of Google IP Addresses

64.233.161.99
64.233.161.104 
64.233.161.105
64.233.161.107
64.233.161.147

The highlighted part is the C-Block (the first 3 sets of numbers)

In February 2005 Googles Backlink Update was a prolonged "Event" which also involved, what seemed to be, many changes or adjustments to it's algorithm. It was due to the changes I was seeing during this "Event" that I began to log the results for one of my pages across all of the Datacenters, at several times during the course of a day. I continued this documentation from February 3rd throughout the entire month of February.

Google Update February 2005

It was during this time that it became apparent that some kind of grouping may be occurring. Upon closer examination I discovered that Datacenter C-Blocks almost ALWAYS reported the same results and the greatest variation occurred from C-Block to C-Block!

Here is the "New" table as above now organized according to C-Blocks.

February Update by C-Block

I think you will agree the second table was much more readable and it is easy to see that, although my page experienced incredible changes (sometimes from hour to hour) that the results within the C-Blocks varied very little. So, all of the Datacenters within a C-Block reported the same results.

• Check across Datacenter IP C-Blocks

• Check for Google Backlink/PR Update by C-Block

The address will look like this: http://66.102.7.99/search?q=cache:ZmuFn7M2RqMJ:www...

The 66.102.7.99 is the IP address of the Datacenter you are currently using.

• Go to Windows Explorer on your Computer.
• Go to C:\WINDOWS and look for a file named HOSTS (no extension - Not Host.SAM)
• Right mouse click on the file and select Open with - select Notepad
• Add this line of code  -  216.239.53.99 toolbarqueries.google.com
  if toolbarqueries.google.com is already present just modify the IP address to 216.239.53.99 (or you can use any of the 19 IP addresses of the datacenters that have already updated)
• Save and close the file.
• Now close Internet Explorer and re-open it!

© McDar, Inc 2005 - 2006

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