Google.com Google appears to be smart about how it handles net traffic.

Day two of the Asian Internet crisis. Here's a short update from Shanghai.

Much of the situation reported yesterday remains the same for me: most sites still are not accessible after Tuesday's earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. The traffic is not cut off entirely, however, since some services seem to be working better than others. This story is rather more complicated than a continent being cut off from the rest of the world.

Skype is back in action, but MSN is spotty. When I can get online, I can only see that nobody else is. Yahoo is totally out of service.

What keeps amazing me is that all Google services keep on humming as if there was no problem: Google search, blog search, Gmail, Gtalk, Google Reader, Adsense, Google Documents, Blogger.com... Even the uncensored Google News is showing no delay, although I cannot click through to the original sources in Google News.

I have been asking around a bit why people think Google can avoid the physical barriers that are causing problems for most of the others. One explanation is that Google, without claiming or getting much praise, has been building a smarter Internet. They seem to be able to avoid single points of failure.