if one googless "gmail" and sees the top link opening a compose e-mail to your e-mail address, one probably starts to question reality or if they are in a dream, because it's so insane. its not like winning the lottery or getting hit by lightning, it seems more rare than that because it's an unexpected event that is tied to you. basically the emotional equivalent of going to times square and seeing your picture on one of the big screens with no explanation. fucking crazy.
What I really want to know is who the hell actually googles "gmail"? There's a link at the top of the homepage!
You'd be surprised at what some people do (on laptops and desktops). I've seen ones who refuse to type URLs in the address bar, with the sole exception of google.com, which they then use to type in the URL for the site they're looking for.
They don't even realize the search bar on the top right exists.
I know someone who uses the search bar in the top right to google for "google.com", which they then use to search for "yahoo", then having arrived at yahoo's front page, they search for "mail" to get to yahoo mail. Apparently typing "mail.yahoo.com" into the address bar (or just typing "mail" and having it auto-complete) is "too complicated"...
(I presume that this sort of person is who the GNOME UI team think of when they talk about "average user"? :|)
I've watched people go to the firefox homepage (which is Google) and google google, then click on a sponsored ad. I've also seen people go to bing and bing google go to google then google hotmail and then go to hotmail.
Using search engines this way is also called "navigational search" and it's still how most of the world navigates the web (even sites they know well and use daily!)
It's basically using search as an additional name resolution layer on top of DNS. Because search is more human-convenient, with a layer of semantic processing free from the rigid technical constraints of DNS names. Which is all great, a useful abstraction, until the semantic layer guesses wrong on what the user actually wanted and the abstraction leaks.
While I'm on my phone it's much easier to just open the browser, type "h" in the search box, auto-complete kicks in, I press the "hacker news" suggestion and then click on the first result in the SERPS which gets me in here. Otherwise I would have to start typing "hn..." something in the browser bar, remember that's not how HN's URL actually looks like, curse and revert to using Google.
however, DNS also has an issue for this particular audience. A simple typo could land you on a completely different site which I think is why navigational searching is more useful for those in a rush or those that can't type. I even find my self doing this time. If I ever need to get to thesaurus.com, I usually just type t, h, e, s and then mash the letters a, u, and r a few times and then end it with an s. it isn't that it is hard to spell, but I just find it easier and Google seems to almost always get what I am trying to type so quickly that spelling it correctly wouldn't really make it much faster
In Chrome and Firefox, if you lazily type "gmail" into the address bar rather than "gmail.com" then it will google it for you. I suspect it's rather common, I know I've done it a few times by accident.
I have watched people google 'gmail' and ignoring the autocomplete, but clicking on the link that comes up in the search. At some point people were told "do it this way" and to change that would require a 30-minute handholding and de-education session.
I consider myself as an experienced internet and computer user, but sometime I simply write "gmail" and then click on the first link instead of writing the ".com". Go figure.
This is truly hilarious. Just imagine - some guy, in the middle of nowhere, sitting in front of his computer and suddenly his smartphone starts vibrating with notification about new email. And vibrating.... and vibrating... and after dozens of minutes, he got call. And the caller ask you: Hey, don't you get some emails lately?:D
Finding the search box on google.com, typing gmail and typing enter and then clicking on a large link in bold is a lot easier than clicking successfully on a small subtle link on the top of page.
It's also a lot less error prone than typing gmail.com into the address bar, which could be missed typed as gail.com, mail.com, etc.
I never type website addresses in browser :) I just type phrases like "gmail", "hacker news" or "stanchart india" in Chrome/Firefox omnibox and then click the first/correct search result. I kind of use Google search as way to avoid typos in addresses that may lead of phishing sites.
Different people have different habits. I generally google find most sites unless it's an easy URL or autocompleted. I sometimes even type things like "hack new" on my phone to get here.
(I don't want to make it too easy to get here, if you're wondering why I haven't bookmarked it. Can be a time sink)
I have to say: I've done user testing with (probably hundreds of) users over the years, and I'd say the majority (anecdata) of users never type a URL or use a bookmark - typing 'facebook' or 'gmail' into Google is a very common thing. Incomprehensible as this may be to us nerds, it's a very real thing.
There is no way Google (or I assume any good employer) would fire an employee would for such a mistake. Mistakes happen, they are a part of life in the technical world. You work really hard to make sure the mistakes are minor (which this one is) and fixable, but they are going to happen.
Losing data is really really bad, and if it happens it better be minor and there better be extreme circumstances. If a service goes down, that is bad but shit happens sometimes. Something minor like this is going to make for an entertaining post-mortem, but nothing more. I'm sure Google will do something nice for the person who was affected by it.
Easy rule of thumb for operations: Never make the same mistake twice. You learn from every mistake, but new and amazing ways for things to break are always going to happen.
Source: I worked at Google in operations and made mistakes that were far worse than this
Firing people for making mistakes is a surefire way to ensure that when someone makes a mistake they will do everything they can to cover it up rather than take appropriate action to correct it.
There's also an argument that it makes sure other people will be more careful with their work to try to avoid mistakes. I don't think it's the way to go, but there certainly are managers in the world who do. (Hopefully a vast minority.)
Besides, this is very likely the result of several things all going wrong at once ("a perfect storm"). It's not like there's some dude that's responsible for the "Email" link, who looked at the link and said "yep, that's about right" and saved it to google.
Well, hopefully nothing that dire - I can't imagine this would happen. Likely though those responsible for the incident will craft an incident report detailing what went wrong and why, as well as how to prevent it in the future - preferably in an automated fashion.
It really depends where the crawler is finding these links. I don't think this is a mistake. It's possible that people are adding these links to their site instead of "mailto:" links and crawler is simply indexing them.
It's not the only one overall, but this one likely ranks the highest. It also is bundled with gmail because it links to gmail domain (mail.google.com).
When I search it tries to link me directly to an attachment from an email, but tells me my account is suspended. I am already logged into Gmail though, so it might be different.
The search index is built in mysterious ways, not only from crawled links but also visited sites in Chrome I suppose. We'll probably get an in-depth article from an SEO blog.
But, to be fair, it is only the 24th of January, so there might well be many more crazy things for us in stock. Though Google linking directly to mail some poor Hotmail account will be hard to top, yes.
Those are just valid email addresses (and names, I guess). High-quality leads would be a list of people who are already especially qualified or interested in whatever you're pitching.
If they are actually composing and sending an email without checking what's going on, I guess that says something about those users' personalities... :)
This reminds me of a story on an Australian comedy show where the host gave out an unusual telephone number, calling it "Satan's phone number". Turns out it was a valid number that belonged to some poor sap who got inundated with phone calls. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a source after reading this years ago, so if anyone can confirm this as real or a hoax, step up.
But this really makes me wonder what kind of architectural mishap has had to occur for this to happen? Either way, the poor guy just became a celebrity. Hope he gets some benefit out of it.
It's not a "Gmail Glitch", seems like an index error by Google search, his email was indexed in the site links for "Gmail". I assume that due to the outage searches for "Gmail" spiked, so has his inbox was ddos'd.
Yesterday the GMail App for iOS glitched on me as well. At one point the number of unread emails went to over 2k (in reality about 200), and then notifications for the app got enabled (usually disabled). Nothing major, just minor annoyances.
I didn't think much about it until today's events. Coincidence?
off topic, but the one thing that I hate about google search results is that they are all linked to google.com/url?*. Sometimes my internet will crap out just because of this. Because google's server is too slow to redirect.
> I guess this is for CPC. But it should not be applied on the organic results.
It's been used on all SERPs for months now, ever since Google became extra privacy conscious. It prevents search queries from leaking to site owners via the referrer HTTP header.
I agree with you and 0x0 below. But is the number of query keywords so critical which cannot be released to the owner? I remember that it was shown to everybody when we type keywords and I think that's helpful information to users and to the site owners.
I know if the number is released, the site owners can cheat: "Create networks of fake sites to provide backlinks on popular keywords". This is really the problem of the current SEO. I have a report discussing about that: http://bit.ly/1fcOp8I
I don't agree that Google should be the one doing this, most browsers have a setting for referer like off/on/same-domain-only and if someone wants privacy they can set it the way they like.
It's also extremely irritating if you're copying a link to the site from Google.
I think it's actually being used for years. That's how they calculate click through rates for organic results. The kind of report you see in Webmaster Tools.
They certainly do it for organic results sometimes too. A/B testing or measuring quality of results? Annoying to no end if you want to copy an url directly. I remember looking into it a few years ago and they even went so far as to add js setting the status bar text to the normal url on mouseover.
Even if we redirect users to the search result sites, we don't track by the url, but track by number of hits and number of subscriptions as the performance indicators.
The actual behaviour (the link with a random email address) is so far from the expected behaviour I'm finding it hard to believe how it happened. Probably search indexing/ranking error as others have speculated.
...he contacted Hotmail support this morning to try to get help. Ironically, he asked them to contact him at his alternate email address, which is Gmail.
+200 for additional bounty to have Gmail do customer support quickly too. (Oh remember the time when everyone had an adsense account? Boy that could take up to two months to get an initial reply.)
They're trying to reach Gmail for a comment, but they can't, cause Gmail is down. It's funny. It's also made me realize that I should switch to email provider that I have more control over.
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[ 146 ms ] story [ 622 ms ] threadWhat I really want to know is who the hell actually googles "gmail"? There's a link at the top of the homepage!
You'd be surprised at what some people do (on laptops and desktops). I've seen ones who refuse to type URLs in the address bar, with the sole exception of google.com, which they then use to type in the URL for the site they're looking for.
They don't even realize the search bar on the top right exists.
They use a single field for both URL and search.
(I presume that this sort of person is who the GNOME UI team think of when they talk about "average user"? :|)
I'm a bit at a lose for words...
Yes, yes it is.
EDIT: in fact, just typing "m" autocompletes to that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuOBzWF0Aws&feature=youtu.be...
It's also a lot less error prone than typing gmail.com into the address bar, which could be missed typed as gail.com, mail.com, etc.
Or even better - host your own email server.
Different people have different habits. I generally google find most sites unless it's an easy URL or autocompleted. I sometimes even type things like "hack new" on my phone to get here.
(I don't want to make it too easy to get here, if you're wondering why I haven't bookmarked it. Can be a time sink)
Losing data is really really bad, and if it happens it better be minor and there better be extreme circumstances. If a service goes down, that is bad but shit happens sometimes. Something minor like this is going to make for an entertaining post-mortem, but nothing more. I'm sure Google will do something nice for the person who was affected by it.
Easy rule of thumb for operations: Never make the same mistake twice. You learn from every mistake, but new and amazing ways for things to break are always going to happen.
Source: I worked at Google in operations and made mistakes that were far worse than this
However, I can't understand how this one specific URL ended up being shown as the second link when you search for "gmail".
In any case, I really look forward to explanation how the hell something like this could ever happen.
But this really makes me wonder what kind of architectural mishap has had to occur for this to happen? Either way, the poor guy just became a celebrity. Hope he gets some benefit out of it.
I didn't think much about it until today's events. Coincidence?
It's unbelievable that Google can redirect so many hits at the same time even only on one local server cluster.
I've a review collecting the reports about how many Google servers here: http://bit.ly/1fcluBA: 900,000 (2010)
It's been used on all SERPs for months now, ever since Google became extra privacy conscious. It prevents search queries from leaking to site owners via the referrer HTTP header.
I know if the number is released, the site owners can cheat: "Create networks of fake sites to provide backlinks on popular keywords". This is really the problem of the current SEO. I have a report discussing about that: http://bit.ly/1fcOp8I
It's also extremely irritating if you're copying a link to the site from Google.
Even if we redirect users to the search result sites, we don't track by the url, but track by number of hits and number of subscriptions as the performance indicators.
...he contacted Hotmail support this morning to try to get help. Ironically, he asked them to contact him at his alternate email address, which is Gmail.
this is extrememly dangerous
how can we find out if we were affected