Previously Keep an Open Eye reported persistent Google outages of several minutes. Some readers complained that the provider, Rogers.com in this case, was having DNS problems. Well the latest recurrence of a Google search outage would seem to belie that fact. First, note that the latest Chrome 5.0 browser is being used in all cases displayed. Here is the situation:
A Google Search request came up with the a message similar to the above. The screenshot above was taken near the end of the outage which recovered about 1-3 minutes after this screenshot. But this time Keep an Open Eye was prepared with some network tools to trace the outage.
First a ping got through to the Google.ca site – ten times in fact. So Keep an Open Eye tried the search again using the suggestions the Chrome browser makes – none of the attempts to search worked. Next Keep an Open Eye tried Firefox 3.63 browser – still no connections. So finally a trace route was taken using the same Network Control web page. The results are displayed below:
Yet The trace shows the request getting to the Google-edge processing in Dallas. then a series of steps in unnamed hosts. The eighth hop shows a time out message followed by a linkup hop to the destination address for Google.ca. But just after taking this timing a)the Google Search was retried unsuccessfully and yet b)other sites are available including www.google.com/finance[see screen shot below]. 
Finally, as noted before, the search was done successfully on Google, about 6 minutes after the first failure was experienced.
Anomalous Results
These are strange results to say the least. Keep an Open Eye has talked to colleagues in the area some of whom have also a)seen Google search outages and b)some who have not. There does not seem to be a common Web service provider among those who have experienced similar Google outages. So Keep an Open Eye has directed a query to Rogers.com support outlining the problem and requesting an explanation. In addition Keep an Open Eye has incorporated a Chrome clock extension in the toolbar so the clumsy Windows Clock “timing” will no longer be required. Keep an Open Eye readers will be posted on the latest findings as they become available.
Some observations from your testing… If DNS was an issue, then your traceroute/ping should be conducted from the same ISP (thus the same DNS server that is used for lookup) as your browser. In this case, if it was a DNS issue with your ISP, your Chrome and Firefox would not get Google.ca. However, the DNS @ network-tools.com would not be affected.
The better test would be to do a traceroute or ping from your PC. And have a REMOTE PC, accessible via RDP, LogMeIn, or some other remote console capability to run the same test. Ideally you would have multiple remote PCs, utilizing different ISPs.
Charles
I did do a local ping from cmd prompt with nearly the same results as the Network tools; so I went with that screen capture. I am now looking to find a Windows based traceroute.exe so I can do the tests locally on my PC.
I would be using a second machine linked to a separate network – but my Acer Gateway has crashed and they are burning me on the repairs. So that will await another day.
Ye Editor
FYI – the windows traceroute is “tracert.exe”.