Today on Current TV (who has a partnership with Google) they were talking about search volume and how it can tell Google when a site is down.  Apparently a large spike in searches for a website address is a very good indicator that a site is down.  They then gave several examples of sites like flalottery.com that recently went down. 

Its weird when I can get helpful hints from watching tv.  Now I just need to figure out how to monetive this tidbit.