Google error reports - non-geeks need not apply!

 by Martin Belam, 7 September 2008

I got a '502 Server Error' page when using Google search the other day. After about five minutes of running around like a headless chicken screaming at the top of my voice "OMG! THERE IS NO GOOGLE! WTF! THE INTERWEBZ IS BROKEN!" I actually read the message, and it gave me a good chuckle.

Google error report

I've got this mental image of someone from Google's PR / customer service / marketing department very earnestly sitting down and talking to the engineers and saying, "Don't you think the examples given should be 'I'm using a Windows computer at my mom's house'", and the engineers giving them a withering look, and pointing out that only someone who already knows that:

"I'm using the Konqueror browser on Linux to search from my job at myFoo.com. My machine's IP address is 10.20.30.40, but all of myFoo's web traffic goes through some kind of proxy server whose IP address is 10.11.12.13"

is ever going to submit any kind of technical fault information to Google...

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