This article is more than 1 year old

Google's Caffeine splutters off interwebs

Mountain View cleans up data centre coffee machine

Google's heavily hyped new Caffeine system, that world+dog has been wetting their pants over since its testbed launch earlier this week, is currently offline.

Anyone attempting to play with the firm's new search architecture will be greeted with a message titled "System maintenance" that reads: "Please try your search again in a few hours.

"We are upgrading elements of our data centre. The Caffeine sandbox should be available for searching again in a few hours."

Earlier this week, Mountain View opened up a web preview of the new search functionality and design it has been "secretly" building over the past few months. During that time, rival Microsoft has spun out its own beefed up search offering - Bing.

Oddly enough, the internet kingpin and data centre old hand made the decision to launch the Caffeine sandbox prior to carrying out essential upgrades to the system's powerhouse.

El Reg called Google UK to find out what was going on. As is the norm these days, we were pointed in the direction of a tweet.

"The Caffeine sandbox is down until late Thursday for datacentre upgrades," explained Google Engineer Matt Cutts.

"I considered doing a Hitchhiker’s Guide-style 'DON’T PANIC' tweet, but probably that would be too dramatic. :)," he wrote in a later comment on Search Engine Land's site.

"The Caffeine sandbox is currently single-homed at one datacentre, and that datacentre needs a few upgrades of power components for unrelated reasons," he said.

"We’re shooting to bring the sandbox back up by late Thursday afternoon or evening Pacific time. It’s not a biggie – just wanted to give folks a heads-up so they wouldn’t stress." ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like