Interesting discovery from "The Register" today

By Cade Metz in San Francisco http://ping.fm/l4DrM

Posted in HPC, 8th February 2010 05:02 GMT

Sometime in the middle of October, Google silently launched a new net domain - a barely-disguised doppelgänger to the familiar google.com - and according to the latest stats from the site watchers at Alexa, this mystery domain is now visited by nearly 3 per cent of all net users, making it the 44st most visited domain on the interwebs. In other words, it's bigger than AOL, Apple.com, or the BBC.

Over the past few months, those keeping a close eye on their PC's net traffic have noticed seemingly random connections to this mystery domain. In some cases, the connections arise even before an application is launched, and since the domain name appears - at first glance - to be little more than a hodgepodge of characters, some netizens have blocked it, under the assumption it serves up malware.

But on closer inspection, the domain is obviously Google's, chosen with a mathematician's wink at the search giant's famously misspelled name. This mystery domain is 1e100.net. "1e100" would be scientific notation for 10 100, a one followed by 100 zeros, also known as a googol.

As pointed out by Sebastian Stadil, founder of the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group, 1e100.net translates to "Google Network" - the ever-growing Google private infrastructure that spans nearly forty custom-built data centers worldwide. According to a recent company presentation, Google intends to expand this private interweb to between one million and 10 million servers, spanning “100s to 1000s” of global locations.

Whois records show that Google registered 1e100.net on September 24, and according to data from Alexa, traffic began hitting the domain around the middle of October."

So no need to panic if you see this domain and no need to block, but it would have been nice to have been told :-(