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That might require them to put replicas of the search service in Asia, and operating a distributed system over distant geographies is a hard operational problem.

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Not necessarily: they could terminate the initial connection close to the user and then run a new connection. While this sounds like it shouldn't help, because the second connection is fully under their control they can make it highly reliable and very fast. Additionally, any recovery from dropped packets (on the user's home network) only has the latency of an in-region connection.

This also sets them up for ruining a light cache in-region, and potentially scaling that up to handle more kinds of API calls.

Is this another way to say put a regional proxy or do you mean something more?

A regional proxy should be the same thing, yes. The important thing is that it's not a replica.

Yes I'm sure they've considered doing that as it seems so obvious. I would also think that the use of any one account was very region specific so could you actually base their whole data out near them. Be interesting to hear how they've ended up at the compromise that they have.

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