Hostgator went down yesterday. Hostgator is our hosting provider for many of our smaller websites, including GreenTaxi. So, for about 30 minutes yesterday, all of our sites were down.
At first, I thought it may be just us, but then I went to hostgator.com to get on the support forum and saw that their site was down as well.
I immediately went to Google and searched for “hostgator”. Of course the web search results were for the site itself. I clicked on the News tab to see if there was anything new coming through. Nope, completely blank.
What did I do next? I went to Twitter and searched for “hostgator”. I immediately came across hundreds of tweets about sites being down, including live updates from the @hostgator twitter account that explained the problem. I followed the status from there and everything was back to normal shortly.
Google is losing ground in the real-time search space. Check out the Hot Trends for that hour. The search term “hostgator” was the fifth most popular trending term on google search, and Google did not have a SINGLE piece of news about it in their news search results.
Twitter dominates the information on the net within the first hour or two of something happening. They even do well within the first couple of days.
Now, while Google loses ground, Twitter is also in a bit of pain. Their pages do not load quickly, the API goes down all of the time, and sometimes the site just goes down. They need some serious infrastructure upgrades.
Google dominates that Internet infrastructure. They have more computers than anyone knows what to do with them and tons of bandwidth. Adding Twitter would be a drop in the bucket for them. Yet, it would solidify their search presence for the next 10 years. As access to information increases (especially mobile), Google has to keep up the pace.
Google purchasing Twitter is a win-win. It will help them, it will help users, it will help Twitter. Please, get it done already.
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I apologize for the downtime the other day. I do appreciate the post.
I’ve always been annoyed with Google’s real time search capabilities (or lack thereof) as well and always find myself heading to Twitter for realtime search. Something that is nice is that Twitter is starting to rank fairly well on regular search results (e.g. HostGator’s official Twitter account is currently #5 when you Google “hostgator”).
Great post! Thanks again.
Thank you. It is good to see Twitter in the search results, but it is still not the actual twitter feed, just the link to your feed. I’d love to see what is going on via your feed if I were to search for it in Google itself. Someday…
By the way, we appreciate the quick fix and getting everything back online. I always recommend hostgator to people looking to start up a small site. It’s a great service for a fantastic price. And the customer support has always been very helpful.