Here's one other unusual consequence of the Fisher Plaza data center fire, the small blaze that knocked dozens of Web sites offline for hours last weekend. In an episode that TechCrunch classified as "strange," Google for the past several days was displaying the "Bing Temporarily Unavailable" page in the second search result slot when users typed "Bing" into the Google search box.
Bing Travel was down for about 36 hours because of the fire, but the site has been working since about 11 a.m. Saturday.
TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid says it is a little odd that Google showed that error message five days after Bing Travel came back online. It's also worth noting that the only portion of Microsoft's search service that suffered an outage during the fire was Bing Travel, while the rest of Bing continued to chug along. (Bing Travel continues to operate on separate servers from its day as Farecast, which Microsoft purchased last year.)
So, what gives? A cruel joke by Google?
Who knows. But Microsoft's search team discovered the error, and at about 5:30 p.m. Thursday sent this message via Twitter to Google:
"Hey @Google -can u take a look at ur index/captions? The 2nd rslt 4 Bing shows a cap frm last Sat." The message goes on to show a screen grab of the search result with the "Bing Temporarily Unavailable" message in the second slot.
As of early Friday morning, the problem appeared to be fixed. But it will be interesting to see if we see any more search shenanigans as Google and Bing battle it out.
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