http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/08/google_mystery_domain/
"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 three per cent of all net users, making it the 44th most visited domain on the interwebs.
In other words, it's bigger than AOL, Apple.com, or the BBC."
pointing to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/1e100.net |
Maybe the domain is for Google’s Project 10 to the 100?
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-23-n63.html |
1e100.net link is now broken |
I guess this is a prove alexa.com in general isn't collecting entirely reliable statistics (and this is not the first time I have that feeling), 3 sites linking in and 44th most visited site... sorry, but that's just impossible. The only explanation I could think of is that google uses it to pull in updates, based on http://superuser.com/questions/75841/what-is-1e100-net-and-why-do-i-have-tcp-ports-open-to-it |
It's used to route users to Google's domains. Try a tracert (or traceroute) to google.com. |
"Hey, the fellows in netops asked me to clarify for you folks here's the story:
1e100.net is a Google-owned domain name used to identify the servers in our network. Following standard industry practice, we make sure each IP address has a corresponding hostname. Starting in October 2009, we started using a single domain name to identify our servers across all Google products, rather than use different product domains such as youtube.com, blogger.com, and google.com. We did this for two reasons: first, to keep things simpler, and second, to proactively improve security by protecting against potential threats such as cross-site scripting attacks. Most typical Internet users will never see 1e100.net, but we picked we picked a Googley name for it just in case (1e100 is scientific notation for 1 googol). "
Chris DiBona, http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1541436&cid=31065334 |