Sometimes I like to look for weird things hosted on Google domains. For example, despite being completely dead, toolbar.google.com has a bunch of old stuff still hosted there for some reason, mostly pages used by the toolbar. Many of these artifacts can be found on my Ghosts of the Google Graveyard page.
The way I find these weird artifacts is by using a Google search parameter. If you put in "site:" followed by a website (for example, site:example.com), you can limit results to only include pages that appear on that domain.
A domain you may be familiar with if you've played with stuff like Pihole or tracing utilities is 1e100.net, which typically shows up when you access a Google domain. This is explained on a Google support page to be a domain used to identify servers on Google's network. It also explains the name is based on the scientific notation for the number googol (1*10^100, or 1e100).
1e100.net doesn't bring you to a website when you visit it, but I thought maybe there were some goodies hidden on a subdomain or something and decided to search for site:1e100.net on Google. Strangely enough, I found two Blogger blogs dating from 2013 to 2014. Neither of the blogs seemed to have anything particularly interesting on them, and neither of them use HTTPS (only regular HTTP). They are also both in Indonesian. Based on their Blogspot profile, they seem to be owned by the same person, whose name is likely Galih Putrantyo.
The blogs include:
- http://any-in-2015.1e100.net/ - Has a link to what's apparently another blog of theirs, and a "Under Construction" stock image. Posts were made in 2013. For some reason, the "blog" linked to seems to be an Indonesian company selling logging equipment and doesn't have any indication of ever being a personal blog on the Internet Archive. I'm not sure if the domain has swapped owners at any point in time.
- http://any-in-2615.1e100.net/ - Has another link to the logging company, as well as what appears to be another blog which no longer exists. Through the Internet Archive, you can see that this was a completely normal personal blog. There's also a banner saying to follow them on Twitter, but no Twitter link, and what appears to be an ad for UC Browser.
Both pages link to the person's Blogger profile, which has a bunch of extremely random blogs on it. Other than the two 1e100.net blogs, all of them redirect to the logging company site for some reason. I wonder if this person owns or is somehow involved with the company? I can't really be sure.
Based on how seemingly mundane the content of these blogs are, I can only assume this is some sort of really weird glitch on Google's end. I can't think of any reason why these blogs would have been moved to this domain. It's unlikely that they were for testing purposes due to the author seemingly having no connection to Google. Overall, I can't really think of any explanation for this unfortunately. If someone else can, please let me know.
Someone told me that the Internet Archive wasn't letting them archive the sites, so I decided to try searching them up myself. Interestingly, there are archives going back to 2009, which lead to Google 404 pages (one of which had a rather funny title of Error 404 (Not Found)!!1, was this just a weird mistake a Google engineer made at some point with the 404 page? A mystery for another day.). This snapshot is the first which seems to be involved with the blog author, as it redirects to www.galihputrantyo.com (which is dead now). This seems to be their personal website and doesn't have too much out of the ordinary. Based on their name and their blog's URL, I believe I also found their Twitter handle (galih24jam), but I can't access it because I don't have a Twitter account. I'm not sure if they're still active or posted anything interesting. Maybe someone could reach out to them and let them know that they have one of the strangest blogs on the Internet, presumably due to some strange bug :P
I actually found another 1e100.net site by trying to change the numbers in the URL! https://any-in-2025.1e100.net/ leads to... a Google 404 page. I tried replacing a bunch of other numbers as well, but they didn't lead to anything, not even a 404. https://any-in-2016.1e100.net/ looks as if it's about to load something, but after a long time, it just times out. Very strange... Also, the 2025 page has the same typo in the title as the archived version, and no archives of it exist on the Internet Archive (and there's no way for me to make one).