On 28/5/2017 18:53, Steve Hayes wrote:

On Sun, 28 May 2017 17:16:01 +0000 (UTC), Stef
wrote:

Google's web site is hardly ever down. It's a good place to test if
your DNS is down using its IP addresses. You may get some kind of
error notice, but as long the number IP address you entered is replaced
with a URL with "google" in it, it's working even if typing in
www.google.com doesn't.

pinging both the domain name of a site and its IP address will test the
DNS, too.

Having read the replies to your post, I think the DNS thing is
unlikely, but last week Google appeared to be down quite a bit, but
only in some places. I had to resort to Bing for searches, and was
quite surprised at how quickly it appeared, much faster than Google,
probably because it has less traffic. Sites that connect to Google
were also much slower to load -- they seemed to hang until the Google
connection timed out.

Perhaps, the problem is something other than DNS, but since "it" failed,
it's a good place to start.

Google is a huge, busy site and I'm sure gets lots of DoS attacks, but
it's up the vast majority of the time and good to test if DNS is down or
it's something else. I used to use Yahoo, but it's regularly slow
responding and times out or I get tired of waiting. At least where I am
-- Southwestern US.

I've abandoned Google for searches and now use duckduckgo.com. Fast,
seems up all the time and doesn't profile searchers. I don't and NEVER
will use Bing: Part of my many personal protests against Microsoft and
its business practices. I only use Windows when I have no other
choices.

Stef