Are you sure BGP is at fault?
TCP handshakes were able to comlpete and create a connection.
I thought BGP at first as well but if the either BGP border was gone there would be no completed handshakes?
Could you paste a log of BGP events at that period or point to a place that has event log related to the outage ?
No-one in Georgia could access google, everything else worked. googleapis.com and google.com seemed to be the only thing affected.
If you VPN'd out you were fine. Hilariously, we use tailscale, so thought cool, we'll enable mullvand for everyone, but ofcourse, tailscale needs google social auth to login.. so the fix for our Tbilisi team was install nordvpn, connect to that, login to tailscale, disconnect nordvpn then tunnel out to anywhere.
I spoke to Benjojo (bgp.tools) who heard the incident "was a cable cut shunt near Sofia"
Kagi doesn't seem to work for anything else than American content. At least, queries in non-english or about things unrelated to US culture brought close to nothing (relevant).
Kagi works for me in other languages, but only if I explicitly switch it from "International" to a specific country search. Otherwise it tends to default US results.
Even when you do that, it heavily prefers English content. Whenever I search for some hardware for example, there are several non country related results on the first page. The first 2-3 usually from the selected country, after that it’s not that great.
When I search for “sony wh1000xm5” for example, then the first 2 are from Hungary, the 3rd are a generic English sony.com page, the 4th from the country, all the others is in English and not related to the selected country at all. Austria is a little bit better, it still has generic English results, but mostly it just ignores the differences between Germany and Austria. It’s a huge pain point when you want to buy something.
I live in Bulgaria and even google is pretty bad at this, however adding the Bulgarian word for price at the end of it always worked for me both in kagi and in google
Thanks! In such a case maybe I need to play a bit more with it.
My "nothing" was a bit harsh as "something" is sometimes returned; though, comparing results with even "Ecosia," the latter one always brings something more relevant.
Simply, for me, working with Kagi for non-US queries felt like working with old search engines - a lot of work to make the query and a lot to browse results.
Google being down means gmail, youtube, google docs etc are down in addition to search. Other services that depend on google's services are also down. It affects many more parts of workflows or entertainment or whatever.
That's not entirely true. They provide (partial) search for both Ecosia and Kagi and both of those to have excellent search results. Google can provide good search, they just don't use it themselves.
According to the Economist "Democracy Index" [0], Turkey gets a score of 4.26 out of 10 while Russia's is a much lower 2.03 (highest is Norway at 9.81).
And according to Freedom House's "Freedom in the World Score", Turkey is at 33 out of 100 compared to Russia's dismal 12 (highest here is Finland at a perfect 100).
So while Turkey should be doing better, they're at least making an effort (although it's worth saying that both countries had significantly regressed on these metrics compared to a decade ago).
De-googling is great, and I found Kagi be a superior product. However their politics aren’t good either. Being neutral and apolitical somehow makes giving money (albeit a small percentage) to Yandex. And that company is a supporter of the Russian state.
Every major search engine is financially entangled with one or more national governments, it's impossible for an entity that size not to be. I'd say yes, the only neutral and apolitical stance is to support each upstream search provider in proportion to some objective measure like use numbers, whichever countries you deem those upstream search providers to be involved with.
I try to minimize my use of general purpose search engines as much as possible, by instead using the search functionality of websites whenever I know that website is where I'm looking for something anyway. If I want a Wikipedia page, I search for it on Wikipedia. If I want the page for a function in the standard library of whatever, I search for it through that site. Etc. In this way I've reduced my reliance on general purpose search engines by 90% or more.
This can be made much more ergonomic by setting up "search keywords" in Firefox. Just right-click the search field on a site to add a keyword that will be used when searching through that site.
The Russian state is way less bad that the American state overall, but note that they're both bad overall, and this is not true on the specific issue of Ukraine.
Term "eastern eu" or "eastern Europe" was always fuzzy to me. If deep down you were never sure where you belonged, use this simple test: when you were a kid and you went to your grandparents house during summer vacation, where did they had toilet? If it was inside the house, it's western Europe. If it was outside the house, it's Eastern Europe.
