1. Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004
1. Akamai Outage this week. 2. A Fault Investigation Anecdote 3. A case for Distributed Graphs ROC/OASIS/CATS/RADS, June 2004
Selling your ideas is challenging. First, you must get your listeners to agree with you in principle. Then, you must move them to action. Use the Dale Carnegie Training® Evidence – Action – Benefit formula, and you will deliver a motivational, action-oriented presentation.
Amr A. Awadallah Analytics & Optimization Yahoo Search Technologies
Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004

2. 1. Notes on Akamai Outage this week
Akamai Global Balancing DNS servers go down for 2 hours during peak time on Tuesday 6/15/2004.
This disruption reduced availability to Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Apple, FedEx, AltaVista, Lycos, Symantic.
Reason given by Akamai is a spyware BotNet DDOS attack that focused on Akamai’s root DNS servers (Akamai uses very small TTLs for load balancing reasons). Keynote metrics conflict a bit with this story.
Lesson Learned: Dire need for early DDOS detection and prevention. Very hard problem, Akamai said it really looked like a legitimate traffic spike until it was too late.
To close, restate the action step followed by the benefits. Speak with conviction and confidence, and you will sell your ideas.
Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004

3. 2. Fault Investigation Case Study
Next, state the action step. Make your action step specific, clear and brief. Be sure you can visualize your audience taking the action. If you can’t, they can’t either. Be confident when you state the action step, and you will be more likely to motivate the audience to action.
Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004

4. 2. Manual Analysis/Investigation
Breakdown by component
Rebooting
Rolling Back
Seasonal Analysis
Breakdown by browser (user-agent)
Breakdown by country
Breakdown by demographic (home, work, school)
A-B Testing …
To close, restate the action step followed by the benefits. Speak with conviction and confidence, and you will sell your ideas.
Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004

5. 2. Cause found by mining user feedback
Cause was a spyware that resides on the client side and parses the received HTML pages before being displayed to the client. The spyware then replaces the web search results with its own paid results and maintains the exact look and feel of the original site (e.g. search.yahoo.com or
Lesson Learned: Lots of faults can be diagnosed from user feedback, and get toolbar.yahoo.com which has anti-spyware built in, and PUK and search 
To close, restate the action step followed by the benefits. Speak with conviction and confidence, and you will sell your ideas.
Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004

6. Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004
To close, restate the action step followed by the benefits. Speak with conviction and confidence, and you will sell your ideas.
Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004

7. 3. A Case for Distributed Graphs
Social Network services like Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribes.net, eMode Tickle, Orkut, … have a serious response time problem today.
This delay comes from the access time to navigate the social graphs to find shortest distance between people and who their neighbors (up to 3rd degree)
We need a scalable reliable distributed graph data structure that supports query operations ala shortest distance and neighborhood retrieval.
To close, restate the action step followed by the benefits. Speak with conviction and confidence, and you will sell your ideas.
Yahoo Search Technologies, Yahoo, Inc. – ROC June 2004