[substation13]

> preforming a search is basically RO

You don't know this. Google results are not the same for all users. How do you know there isn't R/W going on, particularly when signed-in to Google?

(Unless you work at Google on search, in which case I stand corrected!)

[ZiiS]

I am certain the are normally writes going on; they do run Analytics on their homepage. However they get to defer, retry and play lots of eventually consistent tricks, worst case just swallow the exceptions. The fact they can make the service _seem_ to the end user as fully working whilst being unable to write is a major factor in achieving their world beating reliability.