Google not working?
 

At the time of posting this message the great search tool Google is not working (for me a least). I can connect to every other website just fine, but not Google. Even when I tried to ping www.google.com the request just times out. My firewall and IE content filters are not the problem. Is Google truely, actually down? If so, I never thought I would see the day.

I dunno (it seems to be up now), but I don't really think you can count on getting pings back from major web sites even when they're up. A lot of people are blocking ICMP traffic (which includes ping) from the outside since some of the worms floating around use it.

This is definitely no joke. My internet connection is working just fine and I don't have any sites blocked. Google is set as my homepage and it won't even come up. Even if I attempt to run a Google search off of the Google search bar on fark.com it doesn't work. Its just weird I can't figure out what could be the problem (as you say it works just fine for you).

Accck, I just ping'ed google. Maybe I'm full of shit about the ICMP thing.

Microsoft is the only site I know of which blocks pings. Which is really a pity, because I'd like to be using some of their bandwidth.

As I've stated several times I am not real proficient with the computer, Internet, etc., but in layman's terms, what do you guys mean by "ping"?

Basically, your computer sends a message to another computer on the internet saying, "Are you there?". If the other computer gets your message, it sends back a reply saying "Yep. I'm here". If it doesn't, then you don't get a response.

Thanks Juju. When and/or why would you send a ping?

1) Whenever you want to see if a certain website is currently "up" on the internet.

2) Whever you want to determine if you yourself are on the internet.


So, if you ping google.com and get no response, that means that either you're not online or they are not online.

Whitehouse.gov also blocks pings, BTW.

How strange this seems to me. If I dial up the Internet and I'm on-line, then why would I need to see if I'm on-line?

As far as seeing if a certain website is "up", would that be like you try to go to a site and that stupid, irritating "Page Cannot Be Found" thing comes up, so you "ping" the site to see if it's "up"?

Hope I'm not bugging you with the stupid questions:biggrin:

Why would a site block pings?

Lots of times, like if you're at work, you don't have a modem. You just have a wire going into a wall. All the computers at businesses are usually connected together and they all share the same modem, which may be in a hall closet somewhere 10 floors below you. In that case, it may be quite a pain to go all the way down there to check it out, and you might not even have the authority to do so.

Some websites block pings as a effort to try to avoid being hacked into. Some years ago, there was actually something known as the "Ping of Death", which was a ping that would instantly crash someone's computer. It doesn't work anymore, but I guess some people are paranoid.

Exactly right. In that circumstance, you could then try to ping other websites. If you don't get responses from any of them, then chances are that you're not online. If all of these other sites give a response, then you are online, and the problem lies with the first site.

Thank you for the helpful info., but how exactly do you send a ping?

You open up a command window, which I think is in your Start menu under Program Files->Accessories. Then you type "ping google.com".