Google loses .com.au briefly

Google's indexing service dropped all Web sites with a .com.au extension for a few hours on Friday, effectively leaving millions of sites unattainable from the Net's most popular search engine. Australia's major second-level domains, such as .gov.au, .net.au and .edu.au seemed unaffected. However, Google's paid-for advertisements, which appear on the right of regular search results, displayed .com.au domains as normal.

The company confirmed the problem in a statement. "For a few hours today, Google experienced temporary problems showing .com.au domains. The cause was quickly identified and is now fixed," it said.

Munir Kotadia of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

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Millions??

Again I'm underwhelmed by CNet's inattention to the medium they seek to cover. This article claims that Google's problem leaves "millions of sites unavailable," yet there are less than 500,000 .com.au domains, according to the body who licenses them. (http://www.auda.org.au/news.php?newsid=29)

Sure, some companies may have sub-sites ("subsite.domainname.com.au") but that's cutting it a bit fine. Accuracy is important if you want to be taken seriously in journalism.