Rambler is a Russian search engine created back in 1996 and is one of the largest portals. It hosts multifunctional Internet projects: music, video, dating, games, tops. Justifying its name ("rambler" in translation from English means "vagabond"), the search engine looks for information in many languages of the world.
The work of the Rambler search engine is based, first of all, on the Yandex search engine, or, as experts say, on its engine. Therefore, when Yandex malfunctions, the problem along the chain extends to Rambler: the page opens, but does not respond to requests.
There can be several reasons for a malfunction. When such a force majeure happened in September 2011, it was assumed that the cause was problems with the power supply of the Moscow data center, a specialized building for hosting servers and communication equipment. The data center is also responsible for connecting subscribers to Internet channels.
Global failure of Yandex, and then Rambler, may happen due to a breakdown of equipment that receives user requests. It should be noted that the load on the balancer is very high - more than 60 requests per second. Each of the processing steps is duplicated and protected. Thanks to this, the search engine is resistant to failures in certain areas, accidents, equipment failures.
The search included 77 backends, grouped by 11 machines. If one machine fails, the entire load is transferred to the others, and the issuance of documents will continue. Recently, a new vertical search technology has been introduced, in which all missing information can be supplemented from other documents.
Large-scale and long-term breakdowns in the work of search engines do occur, but quite rarely. Over the past 10 years, there were only two of them, and even those for rather trivial reasons. These reasons, as mentioned above, are related to the power supply, when, for example, the air conditioning was turned off or the cable was cut.
Minor errors in work are simply invisible for users, since a process of so-called "fault tolerance" has long been introduced into the system.
