5 ms·

In one of Google's lobby there is a 3-D animation of a spinning globe, with spikes that appear wherever and whenever searches are performed, with the height of

In one of Google's lobby there is a 3-D animation of a spinning globe, with spikes that appear wherever and whenever searches are performed, with the height of the spikes being proportional to the rate of query submissions. The recruiter who showed me this was very proud of google's accomplishment and indeed it was impressive to see the spikes erupting from the east and west coast of the US, Europe, Japan and India. But I watched quietly, sadly and solemnly South America and Africa. There were modest spikes in south africa and brazil. Not many anywhere else. Both continents are quite populous. Among the reasons for the choices I've made in my life and my career the last few years is that I have come to regard the vast majority of the code I've written in my long career as a developer as being of no real lasting value to anyone. Instead I wander around downtown and oldtown portland seeking out crazy people then finding some way to lift their spirits somehow. It can be a little frightening as I specialize on the particularly violent sort. Those are also the most cruelly isolated: "LEAVE ME ALONE! LEAVE ME ALONE! WHY DON'T YOU LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE?" The gent he was accusing had no clue. "Hi! My name is Mike. What's yours?" "Jerry! Pleased to meet you." Does it have to be so hard? My point is that those google search spikes would be erupting all over South America and Africa were someone to take responsibility to enable them. I intend to contribute somehow, someday, in part by setting up some nameservers in cybercafes. There are actually lots of them, cybercafes are quite popular in the developing world.

RyanZAG 11y ago
I'm in Africa and... I'm sorry, but we have nameservers already. That's not really a problem. Are you really talking about DNS servers here? I wasn't sure. The issues which prevent those spikes you'd like to see on the maps at Google are education (primarily literacy, especially English literacy), access to devices, and culture. Access to devices is being solved by cheap smartphones becoming obtainable to some degree and constant improvements to data networks in African countries, but the other two have no easy solution. EDIT: To maybe make it a bit easier - consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots. If you tried to tell him "hey, you could ask Google that question" the only reply you'd get would be "I don't really know about that". I've had someone come to me to ask me to look up bus fares on the internet for them. They'd hand me a piece of paper with the URL for the bus companies tariff page. Not too interesting until that same person later pulled out his Windows Phone smartphone to make a phone call, and he had full internet access and a good mobile browser on that phone.
- noobermin 11y ago
  I'm not sure how related this is, but my parents are from a Pacific island, Palau (I've mentioned it before in other comment threads). One of the things that hurts progress in my country isn't really a lack of education as much as it is ignorance in the strict sense. It's funny, because a couple of years ago, a trans-Pacific cable was laid close to the island, but the decision was made to not invest in tapping into it due to the cost--even nowadays, people are interested in improving connections, but it isn't a priority. They really haven't experienced the internet, at least not in it's full capacity, so they don't know what they are missing. They know about it from what they see on T.V. ("viral" review shows targeted at baby-boomers who still watch T.V., I suppose) and social networking, so simply, they don't know what they're missing. I recall when I finish high school and moved back here to the US for college--I basically missed the dotcom-boom days of the late 90's and early to mid 2000's, the internet was not just a convenience, it completely changed my living habits. But the so-called "other three billion" really can't know this because they haven't experienced this, so not only do you face real obstacles, but you face lethargy as well. At least for Palau, I feel like that is one of the main reasons internet access is pretty subpar there today. [*] I do admit that this might not be relevant in parts of Africa. For one, Palau is a pretty small place (no more than twenty-thousand people), so attitudes are probably much more homogeneous (with that attitude towards the urgency of improving internet infrastructure) compared to hosts of nations with millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.
- karmazeroed 11y ago
  Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.
  - hstrauss 11y ago
    South African here. There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop. For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastructure. Finally, there seems to be traction with FTTx providers, but this seems limited to affluent pockets of a few thousand people in the country. All the new fibre offerings serve the same locations. While it's hopeful this will improve the situation in the medium-term, the backhaul from ISP to eyeball is oversubscribed at least 30:1 for ADSL, with equipment being replaced by (IMO) inferior network equipment. Additionally, there are reports of automated line-conditioning software which should improve local loop connectivity, but I've seen DSL sync issues only since the software has been implemented. The (ex-public, privatised under Telkom) Exchanges have been neglected and have recently been divided into three groups: Earners, Maintainers and "Lost Causes". The latter two will not receive upgrades from ADSL1 and the Earners will likely migrate to newer technologies. This is largely due to copper-theft and vandalism of exchanges/cellular base-stations (which are oversubscribed enough that wireless technologies routinely sustain 3000-20000ms latencies). The oligopoly running cellular networks have no incentive to improve this, since the Regulatory Authorities don't really seem to push competition as well as we'd like. TL;DR: There are issues, but rose-tinted glasses make me hopeful in the medium term. Claims are that wireless will fix everything seem bleak, since base stations become oversubscribed faster than they can be built/upgraded (and the backhaul from them is measured in megabits/s, rather than gigabits/s charged at ~US$0.15/MB).
mc32 11y ago
Google isn't the leading search engine in all countries of the world, so they should not spike everywhere. I'm surprised you didn't notice Russia and China not spiking as much either.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Google is the leading search engine in both Africa and South America though.
- floatboth 11y ago
  Google is second to Yandex in Russia, but still very, very popular.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  China here. Google isn't working, supposedly they have connection issues (but we all know the GFW is blocking it). Not surprising to not get traffic from a country not letting it in.
  - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
    I once read that the GFW permits google from time to time so as to fool those who search with google into thinking that it is a technical fault on google's part, rather than censorship.
    - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
      If you ask China Telecom why Google and Facebook aren't working, they'll tell you it "must be due to technical problems on their side" -- they do not officially block any websites (some WTO concern) and are incredibly opaque about what they do block.
      - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
        It seems to me Google and Facebook would have standing to force the US government to tariff or even block chinese imports.
yxhuvud 11y ago
What is your requirement for something to be 'lasting'? I don't expect my code to last forever, but if the code I write manage to be part of something that is state of the art for a while in one particular niche, then that is more than enough for me. The only truly lasting pieces of code are the really basic building blocks, stuff like ntpd. Everything else is ephemeral but evolves over time. Eventually new basic building blocks will appear from that, but the process of getting those are mostly accidental. As for Africa, it is probably a case of not having gained a critical momentum for the kind of infrastructure the article talks about. This doesn't mean it won't happen - while we don't build CDNs at the place I work, we do build basic infrastructure for access control in wireless and mobile networks, and we are definitely seeing more activity and business from African regions compared to how it was earlier.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  I want to leave something behind for others when I'm gone. Most of the code I've ever written, if it will build, won't run on today's computers. While it could be made to by porting a few years after that again it won't work. Consider Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; you can find them in any library and most good bookstores despite having been composed almost 3,000 years ago.
wordbank 11y ago
> There were modest spikes in south africa and brazil. Not many anywhere else. Huh? South America has good overall Internet penetration[1] and Chile is going to 70% right now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users#/media/File:InternetPenetrationWorldMap.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
- WildUtah 11y ago
  South America is the most sparsely populated continent except Australia and Antarctica. The Amazon and Patagonia regions host very little human population (thank goodness). So South America would always show up as a few big coastal cities with vast emptiness inside, even with huge search penetration on Google's cool visualization. It really doesn't tell you much either way without raw data.
stuaxo 11y ago
Sounds like the spikes should be the higher depending on how slow they are, that would make people want to fix it.

RyanZAG 11y ago

I'm in Africa and... I'm sorry, but we have nameservers already. That's not really a problem. Are you really talking about DNS servers here? I wasn't sure. The issues which prevent those spikes you'd like to see on the maps at Google are education (primarily literacy, especially English literacy), access to devices, and culture. Access to devices is being solved by cheap smartphones becoming obtainable to some degree and constant improvements to data networks in African countries, but the other two have no easy solution. EDIT: To maybe make it a bit easier - consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots. If you tried to tell him "hey, you could ask Google that question" the only reply you'd get would be "I don't really know about that". I've had someone come to me to ask me to look up bus fares on the internet for them. They'd hand me a piece of paper with the URL for the bus companies tariff page. Not too interesting until that same person later pulled out his Windows Phone smartphone to make a phone call, and he had full internet access and a good mobile browser on that phone.

noobermin 11y ago
I'm not sure how related this is, but my parents are from a Pacific island, Palau (I've mentioned it before in other comment threads). One of the things that hurts progress in my country isn't really a lack of education as much as it is ignorance in the strict sense. It's funny, because a couple of years ago, a trans-Pacific cable was laid close to the island, but the decision was made to not invest in tapping into it due to the cost--even nowadays, people are interested in improving connections, but it isn't a priority. They really haven't experienced the internet, at least not in it's full capacity, so they don't know what they are missing. They know about it from what they see on T.V. ("viral" review shows targeted at baby-boomers who still watch T.V., I suppose) and social networking, so simply, they don't know what they're missing. I recall when I finish high school and moved back here to the US for college--I basically missed the dotcom-boom days of the late 90's and early to mid 2000's, the internet was not just a convenience, it completely changed my living habits. But the so-called "other three billion" really can't know this because they haven't experienced this, so not only do you face real obstacles, but you face lethargy as well. At least for Palau, I feel like that is one of the main reasons internet access is pretty subpar there today. [*] I do admit that this might not be relevant in parts of Africa. For one, Palau is a pretty small place (no more than twenty-thousand people), so attitudes are probably much more homogeneous (with that attitude towards the urgency of improving internet infrastructure) compared to hosts of nations with millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.
karmazeroed 11y ago
Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.
- hstrauss 11y ago
  South African here. There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop. For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastructure. Finally, there seems to be traction with FTTx providers, but this seems limited to affluent pockets of a few thousand people in the country. All the new fibre offerings serve the same locations. While it's hopeful this will improve the situation in the medium-term, the backhaul from ISP to eyeball is oversubscribed at least 30:1 for ADSL, with equipment being replaced by (IMO) inferior network equipment. Additionally, there are reports of automated line-conditioning software which should improve local loop connectivity, but I've seen DSL sync issues only since the software has been implemented. The (ex-public, privatised under Telkom) Exchanges have been neglected and have recently been divided into three groups: Earners, Maintainers and "Lost Causes". The latter two will not receive upgrades from ADSL1 and the Earners will likely migrate to newer technologies. This is largely due to copper-theft and vandalism of exchanges/cellular base-stations (which are oversubscribed enough that wireless technologies routinely sustain 3000-20000ms latencies). The oligopoly running cellular networks have no incentive to improve this, since the Regulatory Authorities don't really seem to push competition as well as we'd like. TL;DR: There are issues, but rose-tinted glasses make me hopeful in the medium term. Claims are that wireless will fix everything seem bleak, since base stations become oversubscribed faster than they can be built/upgraded (and the backhaul from them is measured in megabits/s, rather than gigabits/s charged at ~US$0.15/MB).

mc32 11y ago

Google isn't the leading search engine in all countries of the world, so they should not spike everywhere. I'm surprised you didn't notice Russia and China not spiking as much either.

jpatokal 11y ago
Google is the leading search engine in both Africa and South America though.
floatboth 11y ago
Google is second to Yandex in Russia, but still very, very popular.
seanmcdirmid 11y ago
China here. Google isn't working, supposedly they have connection issues (but we all know the GFW is blocking it). Not surprising to not get traffic from a country not letting it in.
- MichaelCrawford 11y ago
  I once read that the GFW permits google from time to time so as to fool those who search with google into thinking that it is a technical fault on google's part, rather than censorship.
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    If you ask China Telecom why Google and Facebook aren't working, they'll tell you it "must be due to technical problems on their side" -- they do not officially block any websites (some WTO concern) and are incredibly opaque about what they do block.
    - MichaelCrawford 11y ago
      It seems to me Google and Facebook would have standing to force the US government to tariff or even block chinese imports.

yxhuvud 11y ago

What is your requirement for something to be 'lasting'? I don't expect my code to last forever, but if the code I write manage to be part of something that is state of the art for a while in one particular niche, then that is more than enough for me. The only truly lasting pieces of code are the really basic building blocks, stuff like ntpd. Everything else is ephemeral but evolves over time. Eventually new basic building blocks will appear from that, but the process of getting those are mostly accidental. As for Africa, it is probably a case of not having gained a critical momentum for the kind of infrastructure the article talks about. This doesn't mean it won't happen - while we don't build CDNs at the place I work, we do build basic infrastructure for access control in wireless and mobile networks, and we are definitely seeing more activity and business from African regions compared to how it was earlier.

MichaelCrawford 11y ago
I want to leave something behind for others when I'm gone. Most of the code I've ever written, if it will build, won't run on today's computers. While it could be made to by porting a few years after that again it won't work. Consider Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; you can find them in any library and most good bookstores despite having been composed almost 3,000 years ago.

wordbank 11y ago

> There were modest spikes in south africa and brazil. Not many anywhere else. Huh? South America has good overall Internet penetration[1] and Chile is going to 70% right now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users#/media/File:InternetPenetrationWorldMap.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

WildUtah 11y ago
South America is the most sparsely populated continent except Australia and Antarctica. The Amazon and Patagonia regions host very little human population (thank goodness). So South America would always show up as a few big coastal cities with vast emptiness inside, even with huge search penetration on Google's cool visualization. It really doesn't tell you much either way without raw data.

stuaxo 11y ago

Sounds like the spikes should be the higher depending on how slow they are, that would make people want to fix it.