Google's 40 minute outage, which I reported, was caused by 'human error' according to a report by the BBC.
Reading the account it seemed that several basic tasks weren't done.
1) The Live site is not checked after updates are performed on it
2) The risk that incorrectly updating the Stopbadware.org list file was something that could stop the site from working properly was not identified.
3) The site is not very regularly checked to see if it still working properly
Any Web-Master will tell you that identifying risks and checking the site works after updates and at regular periods are some of the basics of maintaining a service.
You could argue that with a site as large as Google's this is almost impossible, well just like backing up the Walmart database you do have to make the seemingly impossible -possible in protecting your service and your business.
These days confidence can be lost so quickly, the recent past has shown that house-hold names and successful businesses are not immune.
To Google's credit they did find the problem and fixed it very quickly.
So have I changed search provider? Up until yesterday I had used Google on the odd occasion, my prefered Search Engine is Ask.co.uk because I like it's design, so when I did try it, sods-law, it's not working!