So you are probably reading this because you are not sure what 1e100.net is or why you are being redirected via it when performing Google searches or using products such as youtube etc.
Perform a SiteWhois lookup
1e100.net is owned by Google and has been in use since October 2009, if you perform a whois on the domain you can see it’s registration details linked back to Google.
Perform an SiteInfo lookup
If you want to find out more information about the domain you can use our SiteInfo service we setup a few years ago over at hsmoore.com/siteinfo/.
By performing a SiteInfo lookup on google.com you can see that each time you run it the servername is different and by looking on the map below the lookup results that the location of that redirected server is in different places all the time, this is due to load balancing. Perform a SiteInfo lookup on google.com now to see for yourself!
Each time you query google.com you will be load balanced to one of the many servers around the world that are less busy to take your request, e.g. qw-in-f105.1e100.net or qw-in-f103.1e100.net or vx-in-f99.1e100.net etc.
The domain name
The domain name 1e100.net is actually a very “Googley” type name as it is scientific notation for 1 googol or 1 times 10 to the 100th power.
Why did they do this?
They did this to keep everything simpler, more secure and to protect against cross-site scripting attacks.
The Spanner Platform
Spanner is a platform that Google are now using to better automate moving replicas of data across their world-wide datacenters to help bandwidth, prevent packet loss and reduce system failures.
A Google employee said “..Google is intent on scaling Spanner to between one million and 10 million servers, encompassing 10 trillion (1013) directories and a quintillion (1018) bytes of storage. Imagine that. A single corporation housing an exabyte of the world’s data..”