Just as Google was announcing plans to raise upwards of $3 billion through its initial public offering this fall, the two largest search engines in the United States felt the impact of an intrusive new virus that managed to cripple search engines for a decent part of the day.
The virus was an evolution of the MyDoom web worm that hit computers earlier this year. The new variation not only scans the hard drives of its victims for e-mail addresses, but also sends out queries to search engines in order to locate additional addresses to target. Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technology for Keynote Systems Inc., told reporters that requests from the worm "have been overloading the search engines."
Both Google and Yahoo! issued statements explaining that while there had been a slow down in their respective services, both engines had managed to block the worm from their systems by Monday afternoon. "A small percentage of our users and networks that have the MyDoom virus have been affected for a longer period of time. At no point was the Google Web site significantly impaired, and service for all users and networks is expected to be restored shortly" said David Krane, a spokesperson for Google.
Search Engine Guide has this report.
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