Maybe this happens all the time, and I just don’t know about it, but I just searched on google and got….nothing. It only lasted about a minute, before everything was back to normal, but before it did, I happened to get some screenshots of Google finding absolutely nothing.

This happened around 4:13pm on Tuesday, when searching on the Australian Google server. I first typed in “startup news”, attempting to find some news on new tech startups. Google returned nothing. I took a quick double-take, and thought for a moment (a very brief moment) that “startup news” didn’t have any results…(103,000,000 at last count).

After playing around with some words, and realising what was going on, I decided to take a screen-grab to document this apparent anomaly. This is what I came up with:

Then, seizing the moment that was upon me, I decided to do what any self-respecting tech-head would, and I therefore give you, my Pièce de résistance:

This lasted about a minute, and my colleague searched moments later and the search completed successfully. So it was by no means a catastrophe on Google’s part, and at most was the switching over of a database backup or something similar.
It really surprised me however, as Google has become such an ever-present foundation of web surfing, that having it go down was quite a weird experience. If anyone from Google can explain this, or if any user’s have ever experienced this, drop me a comment or send me an email.